United States

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) excel at many multimodal tasks, yet they frequently struggle with tasks requiring precise understanding and handling of fine-grained visual elements. This is mainly due to information loss during image encoding or insufficient attention to critical regions. Recent work has shown promise by incorporating pixel-level visual information into the reasoning process, enabling VLMs to access high-resolution visual details during their thought process. However, this pixel-level information is often overused, leading to inefficiency and distraction from irrelevant visual details. To address these challenges, we propose the first framework for adaptive pixel reasoning that dynamically determines necessary pixel-level operations based on the input query. Specifically, we first apply operation-aware supervised fine-tuning to establish baseline competence in textual reasoning and visual operations, then design a novel rollout-guided reinforcement learning framework relying on feedback of the model&#39;s own responses, which enables the VLM to determine when pixel operations should be invoked based on query difficulty. Experiments on extensive multimodal reasoning benchmarks show that our model achieves superior performance while significantly reducing unnecessary visual operations. Impressively, our model achieves 73.4% accuracy on HR-Bench 4K while maintaining a tool usage ratio of only 20.1%, improving accuracy and simultaneously reducing tool usage by 66.5% compared to the previous methods.

ACL 2026

Look Less, Reason More: Rollout-Guided Adaptive Pixel-Space Reasoning

## Welcome to EMNLP 2024! 
We are excited to welcome you to one of the most prominent conferences in the field of Natural Language Processing. This year, EMNLP 2024 is being held in a hybrid format,
offering both virtual and in-person participation in beautiful Miami. Due to a record-breaking number of submissions, we've expanded the total number of accepted papers to accommodate more cutting-edge research from around the globe.
### [Conference Handbook](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WPROgxjLAC96AJL7Ugy0tEnYm7dkrbHt/view?usp=sharing)

You are required to register for this event. **Please register [here](https://2024.emnlp.org/registration/).** The EMNLP 2024 event page on Underline will be open to public one week prior to the event.

Please register!

EMNLP 2024

EMNLP 2024 will take place in Miami, Florida from Nov 12th to Nov 16th, 2024, at the Hyatt Regency Miami Hote and on Underline for remote participants.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) excel at many multimodal tasks, yet they frequently struggle with tasks requiring precise understanding and handling of fine-grained visual elements. This is mainly due to information loss during image encoding or insufficient attention to critical regions. Recent work has shown promise by incorporating pixel-level visual information into the reasoning process, enabling VLMs to access high-resolution visual details during their thought process. However, this pixel-level information is often overused, leading to inefficiency and distraction from irrelevant visual details. To address these challenges, we propose the first framework for adaptive pixel reasoning that dynamically determines necessary pixel-level operations based on the input query. Specifically, we first apply operation-aware supervised fine-tuning to establish baseline competence in textual reasoning and visual operations, then design a novel rollout-guided reinforcement learning framework relying on feedback of the model's own responses, which enables the VLM to determine when pixel operations should be invoked based on query difficulty. Experiments on extensive multimodal reasoning benchmarks show that our model achieves superior performance while significantly reducing unnecessary visual operations. Impressively, our model achieves 73.4% accuracy on HR-Bench 4K while maintaining a tool usage ratio of only 20.1%, improving accuracy and simultaneously reducing tool usage by 66.5% compared to the previous methods.

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) 
<html><button style="display: inline-flex; align-items: center; justify-content: center; white-space: nowrap; border-radius: 9999px; font-weight: bold; background: #7c3aed; color: white; font-family: 'Space Grotesk', sans-serif; height: 40px; font-size: 16px; padding: 0 20px; border: none; cursor: pointer" onclick="window.open('https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QiJFOmMjvDgsDo3i1XzlQnImxe3RU_Cy/view?usp=sharing')">Conference Handbook</button></html>

To access this event page, you need to log in with the **email address you registered with**. Access credentials will be sent to your email from Underline - subject line "Welcome to ACL 2026". Please be sure to check your spam email folder if you do not see an email confirmation right away.

To access this event page, you are required to register.
Please complete your registration to continue.

We recommend reading [**the registration information**](https://2026.aclweb.org/registration/) first.

**Online Registration Form**: https://acl.swoogo.com/acl2026

Registration Required

The 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026) will take place in San Diego, California, from July 2 - 7, 2026.

While Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in image captioning, existing research primarily focuses on real-world scenarios, leaving surreal, highly stylized, and semantically hybrid virtual-world scenarios significantly underexplored. In this work, we introduce \textbf{Game Character Captioning}, a novel task designed to evaluate LVLMs' capability to perceive and describe game character from the virtual-world. To facilitate evaluation, we establish \textbf{GC-Bench}, a manually annotated benchmark, and propose \textbf{Graph-F1} to effectively assess performance on this task. Our evaluation reveals that: (1) current state-of-the-art LVLMs, including closed-source giants such as \texttt{Gemini 3 Pro} and \texttt{GPT-5.1}, struggle to maintain the high performance seen in real-world scenarios; and (2) a notable gap exists between open-source and closed-source models. To bridge this gap, we construct \textbf{GC-148K}, a large-scale dataset generated via a specialized data pipeline, and develop the \textbf{G-Cap} series. Experiments demonstrate that G-Cap series rivals the performance of advanced closed-source models at a lower cost, offering an efficient solution for industrial-grade production environment.

G-Cap: A Game Character Caption Generator

The data mixture used in the pre-training of a language model is a cornerstone of its final performance. Static data mixing strategies in Large Language Model (LLM) pre-training are often suboptimal as they fail to adapt to the model's evolving learning states. Conversely, fully online dynamic updates, while adaptive, incur prohibitive computational costs. To bridge this gap, we propose TiKMiX, an efficient semi-dynamic data mixing framework. Our approach is grounded in a key observation of influence ranking invariance: the relative importance of data domains exhibits strong temporal stability over long training intervals. Leveraging this insight, we propose Group Influence, an efficient approach for quantifying domain impact, and formulate data mixing as a periodic, low-overhead influence maximization problem. Compared with REGMIX, the proposed method reduces computational overhead by 80% and achieves an average performance gain of 2% across nine downstream benchmarks, thereby effectively mitigating data under-digestion.

TiKMiX: Efficient Semi-Dynamic Data Mixture via Data Influence for LLM Pre-training

Model Editing, also known as knowledge editing, is receiving increasing attention in the field of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, existing model editing approaches predominantly focus on knowledge-level or static visual domains, overlooking dynamic semantics. This paper exploratively applies six representative model editing methods (FT, IKE, MEND, SERAC, MEMIT and AlphaEdit) to Video Large Language Models (Vid-LLMs) and introduces the first benchmark specifically designed for Vid-LLMs editing—VMEB (Vid-LLMs Model Editing Benchmark)—systematically extending model editing research from static modalities to dynamic video scenarios. We position this work as a forward-looking benchmark and a foundational diagnostic study: in the video paradigm, our evaluation dimensions encompass traditional metrics including Reliability, Locality, and Generality, while also introducing a video-specific metric: Robustness. Based on experimental results, we analyze the strengths and limitations of existing model editing approaches, and identify new challenges and research directions for the future development of the model editing field within the context of multimodal and video paradigms. Our benchmark is available at https://github.com/Sakabamrisa/VMEB.

Editing the Moving World: Model Editing for Video LLMs

Despite the rapid progress of LLMs, their evaluation remains hindered by static, manually curated benchmarks with limited task coverage and poor adaptability to emerging domains. Existing automated approaches typically operate within fixed task schemas and often fail to autonomously discover new evaluation dimensions, limiting both scalability and effectiveness. To address these gaps, we propose AutoTaskEval, an automated framework that constructs domain-specific benchmarks directly from unstructured corpora. Using a refined Bloom’s Taxonomy, the framework systematically discovers tasks, enriches contextual grounding via iterative Socratic prompting, and generates diverse, progressively challenging evaluation instances. Applied to the complex and knowledge-intensive legal domain, AutoTaskEval uncovers a broader and more fine-grained task space than expert-curated benchmarks while producing high-quality instances that preserve established model-level evaluation trends. We further validate its robustness in a low-structure e-commerce review domain. Together, these results show that AutoTaskEval enables scalable, adaptive, and high-fidelity LLM assessment across domains and model families, advancing autonomous and capability-sensitive evaluation.

AutoTaskEval: Towards Domain-Specific and Fine-Grained Evaluation for LLMs

Metaphor reasoning is an essential cognitive ability that maps knowledge from familiar domains to more abstract domains. This ability functions as a meta-ability underlying many types of reasoning. However, existing work rarely investigates how metaphor reasoning affects other reasoning abilities. To bridge this gap, we systematically study how metaphor reasoning, particularly through metaphorical riddles, can enhance broader reasoning abilities in large language models. We propose MetaR, an automated system for synthesizing metaphorical riddles that satisfy five quality dimensions: diverse, balanced, reasoning-oriented, challenging, and verifiable. Leveraging that answer categories determine riddle categories, we employ a hierarchical answer taxonomy for the former three criteria and a multi-agent refinement framework for the latter two, generating a high-quality dataset. Training with reinforcement learning on verifiable rewards using only thousands of metaphorical riddles, we demonstrate improvements across six out-of-distribution reasoning domains. Analysis reveals transfer effectiveness depends on model scale and pattern-target domain alignment. The datasets and code are publicly available at https://github.com/Abbey4799/MetaR.

Metaphor Reasoning is Meta-reasoning

Long-term conversational agents need memory systems that capture relationships between events, not merely isolated facts, to support temporal reasoning and multi-hop question answering. Current approaches face a fundamental trade-off: flat memory is efficient but fails to model relational structure, while graph-based memory enables structured reasoning at the cost of expensive and fragile construction. To address these issues, we propose StructMem, a structure-enriched hierarchical memory framework that preserves event-level bindings and induces cross-event connections. By temporally anchoring dual perspectives and performing periodic semantic consolidation, StructMem improves temporal reasoning and multi-hop performance on LoCoMo, while substantially reducing token usage, API calls, and runtime compared to prior memory systems.

StructMem: Structured Memory for Long-Horizon Behavior in LLMs

The dominant Fill-in-the-Middle (FIM) paradigm for code completion is constrained by its rigid inability to correct contextual errors and reliance on unaligned, insecure Base models. While Chat LLMs offer safety and Agentic workflows provide flexibility, they suffer from performance degradation and prohibitive latency, respectively. To resolve this dilemma, we propose \underline{\textbf{S}}earch-and-\underline{\textbf{R}}eplace \underline{\textbf{I}}nfilling (\textbf{SRI}), a framework that internalizes the agentic verification-and-editing mechanism into a unified, single-pass inference process. By structurally grounding edits via an explicit search phase, SRI harmonizes completion tasks with the instruction-following priors of Chat LLMs, extending the paradigm from static infilling to dynamic context-aware editing. We synthesize a high-quality dataset, \textbf{SRI-200K}, and fine-tune the \textbf{SRI-Coder} series. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that with minimal data (20k samples), SRI-Coder enables Chat models to surpass the completion performance of their Base counterparts. Crucially, unlike FIM-style tuning, SRI preserves general coding competencies and maintains inference latency comparable to standard FIM. We release our dataset and models, establishing SRI as a robust, secure, and efficient alignment recipe for next-generation interactive development.

From Completion to Editing: Unlocking Context-Aware Code Infilling via Search-and-Replace Instruction Tuning

Large Language Models (LLMs) face severe challenges in long-context processing, including quadratic computational costs, information forgetting, and the context fragmentation inherent in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). We introduce LycheeMemory, a cognitively inspired framework that enables efficient long-context inference via chunk-wise compression and selective memory recall, rather than processing all raw tokens. LycheeMemory segments the input into chunks and encodes each into compressed KV-cache style representations using a Compressor. A Gate then dynamically selects relevant memory blocks, which a Reasoner iteratively processes with an evolving working memory to solve downstream tasks. The Compressor and Reasoner are jointly optimized via end-to-end reinforcement learning, while the Gate is trained separately as a classifier. Experimental results demonstrate that LycheeMemory achieves competitive accuracy (up to 82% in ablation variants) on multi-hop reasoning benchmarks (e.g., RULER-HQA), successfully extrapolates context length from 7K to 1.75M, and provides a favorable accuracy–efficiency trade-off against strong long-context baselines. Notably, compared to MemAgent, LycheeMemory achieves an average 2× reduction in peak GPU memory usage and a 6× speedup during inference.

Dynamic Long Context Reasoning over Compressed Memory via End-to-End Reinforcement Learning

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) has become a standard method for improving reasoning capabilities in large language models (LLMs) by eliciting step-by-step thinking, but its effectiveness in multimodal tasks remains unclear. In this paper, we aim to systematically investigate the key question: What can multimodal Chain-of-Thought reasoning do, and where and why does it fall short? To this end, we evaluate 12 multimodal tasks across perception and reasoning categories using both 14 non-reasoning models and 8 reasoning models. Our analysis reveals several important findings: (1) CoT is not a free lunch and should be used selectively depending on the specific requirements of each task. For perception tasks, CoT can lead to undesirable side effects, such as reduced performance in visual grounding and object counting. In contrast, it proves effective for reasoning tasks involving mathematical, scientific, and multi-image reasoning; (2) Compared to original models, existing open-source multimodal reasoning models often yield only marginal overall improvements, possibly due to an overemphasis on mathematical reasoning at the expense of broader capabilities; (3) Visual reasoning remains a key bottleneck for current multimodal CoT, as models exhibit a Look Light, Think Heavy'' pattern where verbal reflection rises and falls during reasoning, whereas visual reflection consistently diminishes. These findings suggest that while multimodal CoT handles verbal reflection relatively well, it lacks the ability to maintain deep visual introspection throughout the reasoning process.

Look Light, Think Heavy: What Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Can and Cannot Do

Existing adaptive learning systems struggle to simultaneously achieve deep personalization, dynamic adaptability, and content trustworthiness, particularly in logically rigorous STEM fields where Large Language Models (LLMs) are prone to "hallucination". This paper introduces LearnerCoMPASS (Cognitive Multi-model Planning & Adaptive System), an integrated, end-to-end framework for adaptive learning. At its core, the framework features a novel multi-model path planning algorithm that orchestrates and fuses the outputs of heterogeneous LLM experts to generate and optimize learning sequences. To enable deep personalization, we design a dynamic cognitive diagnosis module that employs an innovative encoder-decoder architecture to generate precise, multi-dimensional cognitive state vectors for learners. To ensure trustworthiness, the system leverages an adaptively constructed dynamic knowledge graph and a Graph-RAG mechanism to provide factual anchors and logical constraints for LLM reasoning, thereby mitigating hallucinations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LearnerCoMPASS significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in generating high-quality personalized learning paths. Furthermore, ablation studies validate the critical contributions of our dynamic cognitive diagnosis and multi-model planning components.

Downloads

Next from ACL 2026

G-Cap: A Game Character Caption Generator

Similar lecture

Pixology: Probing the Linguistic and Visual Capabilities of Pixel-based Language Models