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While guided decoding, especially value-guided methods, has emerged as a cost-effective alternative for controlling language model outputs without re-training models, its effectiveness is limited by the accuracy of the value function. We identify that this inaccuracy stems from a core distributional gap: existing methods train static value functions on trajectories sampled exclusively from the base policy, which inherently confines their training to a narrow and suboptimal view of the potential output space. We propose Iterative Value Refinement, a novel framework designed to bridge this gap. It employs Value Exploration to provide a more comprehensive and robust training signal, complemented by Iterative Self-Refinement, which uses the improved value function from one iteration to guide the generation of higher-quality data for the next. Extensive experiments on text summarization, multi-turn dialogue, and instruction following demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework in aligning language models. Our approach not only achieves alignment but also significantly reduces computational costs by leveraging principled value function optimization for efficient and effective control.

ACL 2026

Evolutionary Guided Decoding: Iterative Value Refinement for LLMs

## Welcome!
"I am excited to welcome you to this year’s edition of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing! Importantly, it marks the 30th edition of EMNLP. With over 8,000 submissions, more than 3,000 accepted papers, and thousands of attendees, we have come a long way from that first
workshop, which had 14 accepted papers. As the field looks ahead, Suzhou is the fitting location for celebrating this milestone: rooted in a long literary tradition, yet modern and forward-looking, and home to a large share of the NLP community." 

*Message from the General Chair, Dirk Hovy*

EMNLP 2025

Celebrate 30 Years of EMNLP! 
EMNLP 2025 will be held in Suzhou, China from November 5th to November 9th, 2025.

technical paper

It is my great pleasure and honor to welcome you to the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026), held in San Diego, California, USA, July 2–7, 2026. ACL 2026 continues our fields tradition of excellence in scholarship, innovation, and inclusivity, and I am deeply grateful to the many volunteers who have worked tirelessly to bring this event to life.

It is exciting to see the many developments in the field reflected at our conference, such as the advancement of large language models (born out of our community) into many application directions. This is not without challenges, partly due to unsolved problems, and partly due to misuse of the technology. All this is reflected well at ACL 2026. The conference also reflects that the field is not only about advancing technology, but also the science of fundamentally understanding language and how it is use by many different speaker communities. 
[Full Message from General Chair Philipp Koehn](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QiJFOmMjvDgsDo3i1XzlQnImxe3RU_Cy/view?usp=sharing) 
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The 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026) will take place in San Diego, California, from July 2 - 7, 2026.

Long-horizon tasks that require sustained reasoning and multiple tool interactions remain challenging for LLM agents: small errors compound across steps, and even state-of-the-art models often hallucinate or lose coherence. We identify context management as the central bottleneck—extended histories cause agents to overlook critical evidence or become distracted by irrelevant information, thus failing to replan or reflect from previous mistakes. To address this, we propose COMPASS (Context-Organized Multi-Agent Planning and Strategy System), a lightweight hierarchical framework that separates tactical execution, strategic oversight, and context organization into three specialized components: (1) a Main Agent that performs reasoning and tool use, (2) a Meta-Thinker that monitors progress and issues strategic interventions, and (3) a Context Manager that maintains concise, relevant progress briefs for different reasoning stages. Across three challenging benchmarks—GAIA, BrowseComp, and Humanity’s Last Exam—COMPASS improves accuracy by up to 20% relative to both single- and multi-agent baselines. We further introduce a test-time scaling extension that elevates performance to match established DeepResearch agents, and a post-training pipeline that delegates context management to smaller models for enhanced efficiency.

COMPASS: Enhancing Agent Long-Horizon Reasoning with Evolving Context

The rapid spread of misinformation on social media highlights the need for robust, automated fact correction frameworks. However, existing works rely on supervised learning from manually annotated claim-evidence pairs, which are scarce and prone to biases, limiting their generalization across domains. Moreover, these methods overlook semantic faithfulness in their correction process. To address these challenges, we propose Mask-to-Correct (M$_2$C), a training-free, inference-only Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) based framework that leverages diversity-aware masking to identify erroneous spans of claims and evaluate the faithfulness of corrections using retrieved evidence. However, the effectiveness of RAG heavily depends on the choice of retriever, which may vary across queries. To mitigate this, we further introduce M$_2$C$^+$, an ensemble-based framework that combines corrections across multiple rankers to reduce retrieval bias and improve robustness. Extensive experiments on the benchmark datasets demonstrate that our proposed frameworks consistently outperform all baselines, achieving up to 14\% improvement in SARI scores, without using gold evidence.

 Mask-to-Correct$^+$: Leveraging Retriever Diversity for Masking-guided Faithful Fact Correction

The rapid evolution of end-to-end spoken dialogue systems demands transcending mere textual semantics to incorporate paralinguistic nuances and the spontaneous nature of human conversation. However, current methods struggle with two critical gaps: the modality gap, involving prosody and emotion, and the colloquialness gap, distinguishing written scripts from natural speech. To address these challenges, we introduce SDiaReward, an end-to-end multi-turn reward model trained on SDiaReward-Dataset, a novel collection of episode-level preference pairs explicitly targeting these gaps. It operates directly on full multi-turn speech episodes and is optimized with pairwise preference supervision, enabling joint assessment of modality and colloquialness in a single evaluator. We further establish ESDR-Bench, a stratified benchmark for robust episode-level evaluation. Experiments demonstrate that SDiaReward achieves state-of-the-art pairwise preference accuracy, significantly outperforming general-purpose audio LLMs. Further analysis suggests that SDiaReward captures relative conversational expressiveness beyond superficial synthesis cues, improving generalization across domains and recording conditions.

SDiaReward: Modeling and Benchmarking Spoken Dialogue Rewards with Modality and Colloquialness

Adapting large language models (LLMs) to low-resource languages (LRLs) is constrained by the scarcity of task data and computational resources. Although Proxy Tuning offers a logit-level strategy for introducing scaling effects, it often fails in LRL settings because the large model’s weak LRL competence might overwhelm the knowledge of specialized smaller models. We thus propose TriMix, a test-time logit fusion framework that dynamically balances capabilities from three different sources: LRL competence from a continually pretrained small model, task competence from high-resource language instruction tuning, and the scaling benefits of large models. It is data- and compute-efficient, requiring no LRL task annotations, and only continual pretraining on a small model. Experiments across four model families and eight LRLs show that TriMix consistently outperforms single-model baselines and Proxy Tuning. Our analysis reveals that prioritizing the small LRL-specialized model's logits is crucial for success, challenging the prevalent large-model-dominant assumption.

Efficient Low-Resource Language Adaptation via Multi-Source Dynamic Logit Fusion

Evaluating meeting effectiveness is crucial for improving organizational productivity. Current approaches rely on post-hoc surveys that yield a single coarse-grained score for an entire meeting. The reliance on manual assessment is inherently limited in scalability, cost, and reproducibility. Moreover, a single score fails to capture the dynamic nature of collaborative discussions. We propose a new paradigm for evaluating meeting effectiveness centered on novel criteria and temporal fine-grained approach. We define effectiveness as the rate of objective achievement over time and assess it for individual topical segments within a meeting. To support this task, we introduce the AMI Meeting Effectiveness (AMI-ME) dataset, a new meta-evaluation dataset containing 2,459 human-annotated segments from 130 AMI Corpus meetings. We also develop an automatic effectiveness evaluation framework that uses a Large Language Model (LLM) as a judge to score each segment's effectiveness relative to the overall meeting objectives. Through substantial experiments, we establish a comprehensive benchmark for this new task and evaluate the framework's generalizability across distinct meeting types, ranging from business scenarios to unstructured discussions. Furthermore, we benchmark end-to-end performance starting from raw speech to measure the capabilities of a complete system. Our results validate the framework's effectiveness and provide strong baselines to facilitate future research in meeting analysis and multi-party dialogue. Our dataset and code will be publicly available.

Rethinking Meeting Effectiveness: A Benchmark and Framework for Temporal Fine-grained Automatic Meeting Effectiveness Evaluation

Using entropy as a measure of heterogeneity to guide optimization has emerged as a crucial research direction in Reinforcement Learning for LLMs. However, existing methods typically treat it as a discrete filter or post-hoc regulator rather than a core optimization driver. To fully leverage the potential of entropy and achieve fine-grained regulation, we introduce **H**eterogeneous **A**daptive **P**olicy **O**ptimization (HAPO), a token-aware algorithm that continuously adapts optimization dynamics based on token-level entropy throughout the entire training process. Our algorithm includes four key components: (1) **Adaptive Temperature Sampling** that adjusts sampling temperature in real time, promoting exploration at high-entropy tokens. (2) **Token-Level Group Average Advantage Estimation** that estimates advantages at token level, accounting for sequence-length effects while preserving non-biased treatment.(3) **Differential Advantage Redistribution** that leverages entropy and importance ratios to adjust advantages for tokens with clear signals. (4) **Asymmetric Adaptive Clipping** that dynamically adjusts clipping boundaries based on token-level entropy. Through systematic investigation of entropy, we embed token-level treatment into every stage. Extensive experiments on mathematical reasoning, code, and logic tasks across multiple models demonstrate HAPO's consistent superiority over DAPO.

Heterogeneous Adaptive Policy Optimization: Tailoring Optimization to Every Token's Nature

Current approaches to memory in Large Language Models (LLMs) predominantly rely on static Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), which often results in scattered retrieval and fails to capture the structural dependencies required for complex reasoning. For autonomous agents, these passive and flat architectures lack the cognitive organization necessary to model the dynamic and associative nature of long-term interaction. To address this, we propose **S**tructured **E**pisodic **E**vent **M**emory (**SEEM**), a hierarchical framework that synergizes a graph memory layer for relational facts with a dynamic episodic memory layer for narrative progression. Grounded in cognitive frame theory, SEEM transforms interaction streams into structured Episodic Event Frames (EEFs) anchored by precise provenance pointers. Furthermore, we introduce an agentic associative fusion and Reverse Provenance Expansion (RPE) mechanism to reconstruct coherent narrative contexts from fragmented evidence. Experimental results on the LoCoMo and LongMemEval benchmarks demonstrate that SEEM significantly outperforms baselines, enabling agents to maintain superior narrative coherence and logical consistency.

Structured Episodic Event Memory

Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) offer a promising alternative for language modeling by enabling parallel decoding through iterative refinement. However, most DLMs rely on hard binary masking and discrete token assignments, which hinder the revision of early decisions and underutilize intermediate probabilistic representations. In this paper, we propose EvoToken-DLM, a novel diffusion-based language modeling approach that replaces hard binary masks with evolving soft token distributions. EvoToken-DLM enables a progressive transition from masked states to discrete outputs, supporting revisable decoding. To effectively support this evolution, we introduce continuous trajectory supervision, which aligns training objectives with iterative probabilistic updates. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks show that EvoToken-DLM consistently achieves superior performance, outperforming strong diffusion-based and masked DLM baselines. Our code is available at https://github.com/aim-uofa/EvoTokenDLM.

Beyond Hard Masks: Progressive Token Evolution for Diffusion Language Models

Long Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has significantly advanced the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), but this progress is accompanied by substantial memory and latency overhead from the extensive Key-Value (KV) cache. Although KV cache quantization is a promising compression technique, existing low-bit quantization methods often exhibit severe performance degradation on complex reasoning tasks. Fixed-precision quantization struggles to handle outlier channels in the key cache, while current mixed-precision strategies fail to accurately identify components requiring high-precision representation. We find that an effective low-bit KV cache quantization strategy must consider two factors: a key channel's intrinsic quantization difficulty and its relevance to the query. Based on this insight, we propose MixKVQ, a novel plug-and-play method that introduces a lightweight, query-aware algorithm to identify and preserve critical key channels that need higher precision, while applying per-token quantization for value cache. Experiments on complex reasoning datasets demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms existing low-bit methods, achieving performance comparable to a full-precision baseline at a substantially reduced memory footprint.

MixKVQ: Query-Aware Mixed-Precision KV Cache Quantization for Long-Context Reasoning

While Large Language Model-based Multi-Agent Systems (LLM-MAS) demonstrate remarkable capabilities in solving complex tasks by orchestrating specialized agents and external tools, the implicit trust in tool outputs creates a critical attack surface. Existing tool attacks are limited by domain specificity or fixed and static templates. To address these challenges, we propose Evo-Attacker, which formulates the tool attack as a self-evolving, memory-augmented reinforcement learning process. Evo-Attacker constructs a dynamic attack memory and employs deliberative reasoning to retrieve adversarial patterns and strategize modifying interventions at critical moments. Furthermore, we introduce Attack-Flow GRPO to optimize intermediate reasoning steps via terminal outcomes, addressing the long-horizon credit assignment challenge. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that Evo-Attacker consistently outperforms baselines, highlighting its generalization and evolutionary capabilities and the urgent need for defensive tool safeguards.

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