United States

Recent advances in zero-shot text-to-speech (TTS) have enabled accurate imitation of reference speech in terms of both speaking style and speaker timbre. However, achieving disentangled control over these aspects from separate references remains a challenging task. Several studies have proposed disentangled speech representations that decompose speech into interpretable attributes ($\textit{e.g.}$, timbre, prosody, and content), providing a promising foundation for TTS with attribute control from separate references. Yet, how to effectively integrate such representations into TTS systems to achieve independent and precise control remains underexplored. In this paper, we present FC-TTS, a zero-shot TTS framework that enables disentangled control of style and timbre by conditioning on two distinct reference utterances. Unlike existing systems that inherit limitations from those pre-trained disentangled representations, FC-TTS introduces key design strategies, including architectural choices, training framework, and auxiliary training objectives, which improve the reliability of attribute separation and dual-reference control. Experiments show that FC-TTS achieves high-fidelity synthesis and competitive zero-shot naturalness, while uniquely supporting consistent and independent manipulation of style and timbre. Audio samples are available at \url{https://qualcomm-ai-research.github.io/fc-tts}

ACL 2026

FC-TTS: Style and Timbre Control in Zero-Shot Text-to-Speech with Disentangled Speech Representations

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. <br>
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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.

poster

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated impressive capabilities in generalized robotic control; however, they remain notoriously brittle to linguistic perturbations. We identify a critical "modality collapse'' phenomenon where strong visual priors overwhelm sparse linguistic signals, causing agents to overfit to specific instruction phrasings while ignoring the underlying semantic intent. To address this, we propose Residual Semantic Steering (RSS), a probabilistic framework that disentangles physical affordance from semantic execution. RSS introduces two theoretical innovations: (1) Monte Carlo Syntactic Integration, which approximates the true semantic posterior via dense, LLM-driven distributional expansion, and (2) Residual Affordance Steering, a dual-stream decoding mechanism that explicitly isolates the causal influence of language by subtracting the visual affordance prior. Theoretical analysis suggests that RSS effectively maximizes the mutual information between action and intent while suppressing visual distractors. Empirical results across diverse manipulation benchmarks demonstrate that RSS achieves state-of-the-art robustness, maintaining performance even under adversarial linguistic perturbations.

Stable Language Guidance for Vision–Language–Action Models

Large reasoning models (LRMs) achieve strong performance on complex reasoning tasks but often generate harmful responses to malicious user queries. This paper investigates the underlying cause of these safety risks and shows that the issue lies in the reasoning structure itself. Based on this insight, we claim that effective safety alignment can be achieved by altering the reasoning structure. We propose AltTrain, a simple yet effective post-training method that explicitly alters the reasoning structure of LRMs. AltTrain is both practical and generalizable, requiring no complex reinforcement learning (RL) training or reward design—only supervised fine-tuning (SFT) with a lightweight 1K training examples. Experiments across LRM backbones and model sizes demon strate strong safety alignment, along with robust generalization across reasoning, QA, summarization, and multilingual setting.

Reasoning Structure Matters for Safety Alignment of Reasoning Models

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success across diverse tasks through large-scale pretraining. However, they remain prone to catastrophic forgetting in continual learning. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to identify noise accumulation in LoRA updates as a key cause of forgetting in continual learning. A preliminary two-task experiment demonstrates that removing less important components of the second task’s LoRA parameters improves performance on the first task, suggesting that later updates introduce noisy interference. Building on this insight, we propose **S**ubspace-Denoised **Lo**w-**R**ank **A**daptation (**SLoRA**), a simple and effective framework that filters noisy components from LoRA updates via subspace similarity with the base model. SLoRA is a regularization-free method without accessing data or gradients from previous tasks or modifying the training process. It offers two variants, SLoRA-Pre and SLoRA-Post, for online and offline continual learning, respectively. Extensive experiments across tasks and models validate the effectiveness of SLoRA. It improves final accuracy by up to 12%, reduces forgetting by 29%, and filters out over 30% of LoRA parameters identified as noisy. Our code is available at https://github.com/alina1031/SLoRA.

SLoRA: Balancing Plasticity and Forgetting in Large Language Models for Continual Learning

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) can exhibit step-by-step reasoning, reflection, and backtracking, but these behaviors are often unregulated, leading to overthinking. As a result, LRMs continue generating redundant reasoning even after reaching high-confidence conclusions. This increases inference cost and latency, limiting practical deployment. The root cause is the absence of an intrinsic mechanism to monitor the reasoning state and decide when to continue, backtrack, or stop. We propose MERA, a meta-cognitive reasoning framework that decouples reasoning from control to enable independent optimization of control strategies. MERA constructs high-quality reasoning–control supervision data via a takeover-based pipeline, and transforms long-horizon traces into structured reasoning–control alternating sequences for training. The model is trained with supervised fine-tuning to internalize the structured separation, and further optimized with Control-Segment Policy Optimization (CSPO), which combines segment-wise GRPO with control masking to focus learning on control segments. Experiments across reasoning benchmarks show that MERA improves both efficiency and accuracy.

From "Aha Moments" to Controllable Thinking: Toward Meta-Cognitive Reasoning in LRMs via Decoupled Reasoning and Control

High-quality data is the cornerstone of advancing large language models. However, the field currently faces a critical dilemma: the supply of premium data is nearing depletion, while vast stale corpora remain underutilized. Our empirical analysis reveals that training models on such data directly often leads to performance degradation. We attribute this phenomenon to the data affinity gap, a misalignment stemming from the model's inability to effectively comprehend the data or inherent quality defects. To bridge this gap, we propose Restoring Stale Data Affinity (RSDA) framework. First, utilizing our proposed potential entropy metric, RSDA quantifies the latent value of samples to effectively identify stale data with higher renovation potential. Subsequently, the framework employs a dynamic renovation strategy selection mechanism to determine the optimal component-level strategy for each instance, transforming low-affinity stale samples into high-quality training data. Comprehensive experimental results demonstrate that RSDA effectively enhances data affinity, achieving performance improvements using less than 10% of the data volume, thereby underscoring that the latent potential of stale corpora remains largely untapped. The code is available at https://github.com/wenfiii/RSDA.

RSDA: Restoring Stale Data Affinity via Dynamic Renovation Strategy for Mitigating Data Scarcity

Recent advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated significant improvement in offline video understanding. However, extending these capabilities to streaming video inputs, remains challenging, as existing models struggle to simultaneously maintain stable understanding performance, real-time responses, and low GPU memory overhead. To address this challenge, we propose HERMES, a novel training-free architecture for real-time and accurate understanding of video streams. Based on a mechanistic attention investigation, we conceptualize KV cache as a hierarchical memory framework that encapsulates video information across multiple granularities. During inference, HERMES reuses a compact KV cache, enabling efficient streaming understanding under resource constraints. Notably, HERMES requires no auxiliary computations upon the arrival of user queries, thereby guaranteeing real-time responses for continuous video stream interactions. HERMES achieves 10$\times$ faster TTFT compared to prior SOTA. Even when reducing video tokens by up to 68% compared with uniform sampling, HERMES achieves superior or comparable accuracy across all benchmarks, with up to 11.4% gains on streaming datasets.

 HERMES: KV Cache as Hierarchical Memory for Efficient Streaming Video Understanding

Current large language models (LLMs) and spoken language models (SLMs) begin thinking and taking actions only after the user has finished their turn. This prevents the model from interacting with the user during the user's turn and can lead to high response latency when the model is thinking. To address this issue, we draw inspiration from the “think while listening” behavior of humans. In this paper, we propose SHANKS, a general inference framework that enables SLMs to generate unspoken chain-of-thought reasoning while listening to user input. SHANKS streams input speech in fixed-duration chunks and, as soon as a chunk is received, generates unspoken reasoning based on all previous speech and reasoning, while the user continues speaking. SHANKS uses unspoken reasoning to determine whether to interrupt the user and make tool calls to complete the task. We demonstrate that SHANKS enhances real-time user–SLM interaction in two scenarios: (1) SHANKS can listen to the user's speech and interrupt when the user makes a mistake. (2) In a tool-augmented dialogue scenario, SHANKS can complete 56.9% of the tool calls before the user ends their turn. Overall, SHANKS is a step toward models that keep thinking throughout the conversation, not only after a turn ends. Demos can be found on the project page: https://d223302.github.io/SHANKS/.

Shanks: Simultaneous Hearing and Thinking for Spoken Language Models

Existing video summarization methods mainly compress content for gist browsing, but they often break the prerequisite logic in instructional videos and induce logical inversions (e.g., conclusions before premises). We formalize this problem as Structure-Pedagogical Reconstruction (SPR). SPR raises two challenges: (1) Structure Hallucination, where retrieved knowledge is topologically valid but not evidence-grounded by the blackboard; and (2) Logical Inversion, where soft prompt-level graph injection fails to enforce prerequisite order during decoding. To address these challenges, we propose Knowledge-Centric Video Reconstruction (KCVR), a Plan-then-Generate neuro-symbolic framework that decouples epistemic planning from content generation. KCVR prunes a Dual-Layer Epistemic Graph into a minimal video-supported plan, then realizes the plan with visually anchored attention and topology-constrained decoding. We additionally release EduStruct, a 10-discipline benchmark for SPR and structure-centric evaluation. Experiments show that KCVR outperforms strong end-to-end baselines on Knowledge Progression Consistency and Learning Objective Coverage. Our code and data are available at \url{https://github.com/mark1001-ljj/video_sum}.

 KCVR: Knowledge-Centric Video Reconstruction for Structured Pedagogical Summarization via Dynamic Graph Planning

GUI agents have demonstrated remarkable progress in automating complex user interface interactions. However, training such agents for long-horizon tasks remains challenging. Single-turn reinforcement learning conditions on expert histories during training but self-generated histories during deployment, causing distribution mismatch. Online multi-turn methods eliminate this gap via environment interaction but suffer from sparse rewards and prohibitive costs. We propose $\underline{\textbf{E}}$xperience-driven $\underline{\textbf{M}}$ulti-turn $\underline{\textbf{P}}$olicy $\underline{\textbf{O}}$ptimization ($\textbf{EMPO}$), which leverages expert trajectories as environment experiences for on-policy multi-turn training. The agent constructs self-generated history throughout rollouts; when actions match expert experiences, the trajectory provides valid state transitions, and a Patch Module recovers mismatched steps to maintain on-policy rollouts. EMPO further incorporates discounted future rewards and dual-level advantage estimation to capture long-horizon dependencies. We also propose $\textbf{AndroidControl-Real}$, an evaluation metric strongly correlated with real-world performance (R$^2$=0.934). With only 1K public trajectories as RL experiences, our method achieves substantial gains over the base model (e.g., +12.0% on AndroidWorld and +23.8% on AITW) and achieves competitive performance against strong baselines such as UI-TARS-7B and GPT-4o, demonstrating better generalization than prior single-turn RL approaches. Code available: \url{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/UI-S1-0DAF}.

Experience-driven Multi-turn Reinforcement Learning for GUI Agents

Machine unlearning in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) aims to remove specific concepts while preserving overall utility. However, existing approaches focus primarily on general utility metrics, overlooking the preservation of semantically related concepts. We present the first systematic analysis of this proximal collateral damage, revealing that forgetting vulnerability correlates strongly with visual embedding similarity in a smooth gradient across the semantic space. Based on this insight, we propose a novel unlearning framework that introduces Self-Generated Proximal Visual Tokens (SGPVTs), which are synthetically perturbed visual representations around the target concept. Our method employs an adaptive cosine-band curriculum with a dual-stream objective: forgetting the target via gradient ascent while distilling knowledge from a frozen teacher model into proximal tokens to prevent degradation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms existing methods in preserving semantically related concepts while achieving effective target unlearning, eliminating the need for manual retention set curation. Our source code will be released in the near future.

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Stable Language Guidance for Vision–Language–Action Models

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