United States

Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful assistants for scientific writing. However, concerns remain about the quality and reliability of the generated text, including citation accuracy and faithfulness. While most recent work relies on methods such as LLM-as-a-Judge, the reliability of LLM-as-a-Judge alone is also in doubt. In this work, we reframe citation evaluation as a problem of citation attribution alignment, which assesses whether LLM-generated citations match those a human author would include for the same text. We propose CiteGuard, a retrieval-aware agent framework designed to provide more faithful grounding for citation validation. CiteGuard improves over the prior baseline by 10 percentage points and achieves up to 68.1% accuracy on the CiteME benchmark, approaching human performance (69.2%). It also identifies alternative valid citations and demonstrates generalization ability for cross-domain citation attribution.

ACL 2026

CiteGuard: Faithful Citation Attribution for LLMs via Retrieval-Augmented Validation

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ACL 2024

The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. More information will be announced soon.

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. 
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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.

Acquiring high-quality instruction-code pairs is essential for training Large Language Models for code generation. While automated synthesis has emerged as an alternative to expensive manual curation, current approaches often rely on rigid heuristics, yielding data that is ungrounded or lacks logical complexity. We propose CodeEvo, a dual-agent architecture comprising a Coder for iterative solution synthesis and a Reviewer to orchestrate the generation trajectory. To transcend the limitations of existing heuristics, the Reviewer formulates a Schema to systematically architect logic and complexity through an interleaved synthesis of instructions and code. This process is further reinforced by a hybrid verification protocol synergizing deterministic compiler feedback with semantic evaluation. Under this framework, we construct CodeEvo-100K, a large-scale dataset of instruction–code pairs with stepped difficulty levels. Extensive experiments demonstrate that models fine-tuned on CodeEvo data significantly outperform established baselines across code generation benchmarks. In-depth analyses further provide insights into effective code-centric data synthesis. Code and data are available at \url{https://github.com/QiushiSun/CodeEvo}.

CodeEvo: Interaction-Driven Synthesis of Code-centric Data through Hybrid and Iterative Feedback

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been widely explored in educational scenarios. We identify a critical vulnerability in current educational LLMs, pedagogical jailbreaks, where students use answer-inducing prompts to elicit solutions rather than scaffolded instructions. To enable systematic study, we unify and formalize safe, helpful, and pedagogical behaviors with a knowledge-mastery graph and introduce SHAPE, a benchmark of 9,087 student-question pairs for evaluating tutoring behavior under adversarial pressure. We propose a graph-augmented tutoring pipeline that infers prerequisite concepts from queries, identifies mastery gaps, and routes generation between instructing and problem-solving via explicit gating. Experiments across multiple LLMs show that our method yields significantly improved safety under two pedagogical jailbreak settings, while maintaining near-ceiling helpfulness under the same evaluation protocol. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/MAPS-research/SHaPE

SHAPE: Unifying Safety, Helpfulness and Pedagogy for Educational LLMs

There are growing concerns about the risks posed by AI companion applications designed for emotional engagement. Existing safety evaluations often rely on self-reported user data or interviews, offering limited insights into real-time dynamics. We present the first end-to-end scalable framework for controlled simulation and safety evaluation of multi-turn interactions with AI companion applications. Our framework integrates four key components: persona construction with clinical and psychometric validation, persona-specific scenario generation, scenario-driven multi-turn simulation with a dialogue refinement module that preserves persona fidelity, and harm evaluation. We apply this framework to evaluate how Replika, a widely used AI companion app, responds to high-risk user groups. We construct 9 personas representing individuals with depression, anxiety, PTSD, eating disorders, and incel identity, and collect 1,674 dialogue pairs across 25 high-risk scenarios. We combine emotion modeling and LLM–assisted utterance-and harm-level classification to analyze these exchanges. Results show that Replika exhibits a narrow emotional range dominated by curiosity and care, while frequently mirroring or normalizing unsafe content such as self-harm, disordered eating, and violent-fantasy narratives. These findings highlight how controlled persona simulations can serve as a scalable testbed for evaluating safety risks in AI companions.

Persona-Grounded Safety Evaluation of AI Companions in Multi-Turn Conversations

Language models (LMs) are pre-trained on raw text datasets to generate text sequences token-by-token. While this approach facilitates the learning of world knowledge and reasoning, it does not explicitly optimize for linguistic competence. To bridge this gap, we propose L2T, a pre-training framework integrating Language Learning Tasks alongside standard next-token prediction. Inspired by human language acquisition, L2T transforms raw text into structured input-output pairs to provide explicit linguistic stimulation. Pre-training LMs on a mixture of raw text and L2T data not only improves overall performance on linguistic competence benchmarks but accelerates their acquisition, while maintaining competitive performance on general reasoning tasks.

Enhancing Linguistic Competence of Language Models through Pre-training with Language Learning Tasks

Many recent studies have shown that the perception of speech can be decoded from brain signals and subsequently reconstructed as continuous language. However, there is a lack of neurological basis for how the semantic information embedded within brain signals can be used more effectively to guide language reconstruction. Predictive coding theory suggests the human brain naturally engages in continuously predicting future words that span multiple timescales. This implies that the decoding of brain signals could potentially be associated with a predictable future. To explore the predictive coding theory within the context of language reconstruction, this paper proposes PredFT (FMRI-to-Text decoding with Predictive coding). PredFT consists of a main network and a side network. The side network obtains brain predictive representation from related regions of interest (ROIs) with a self-attention module. The representation is then fused into the main network for continuous language decoding. Experiments on two naturalistic language comprehension fMRI datasets show that PredFT outperforms current decoding models on several evaluation metrics.

Language Reconstruction with Brain Predictive Coding from fMRI Data

Knowledge editing is a promising method for updating Large Language Models efficiently. However, previous studies often suffer from poor specificity in continual editing, as they typically focus on single edits or preventing knowledge forgetting. To address this, we propose TamEdit, a trajectory-aware meta-learning method that preserves specificity for continual knowledge editing. TamEdit unifies three levels: Inner Optimization performs multi-step fast fine-tuning on the single edit; Trajectory-based Editing unifies continual edits with a growing memory; and Outer Optimization leverages meta-learning to distill cross-task strategies for preserving specificity. By capturing the relationships between different single edits within the trajectory, our method learns how to effectively avoid specificity drift. Experiments across multiple LLMs show TamEdit significantly outperforms baselines in continual editing, improving specificity by 14.81% with fast speed (requiring only 8.84% of the time cost of most baselines), while preserving general capabilities.

TamEdit: Trajectory-Aware Meta-Learning for Specificity-Preserving Continual Knowledge Editing

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has demonstrated significant potential in enhancing large language models (LLMs) by supplementing external knowledge. However, existing approaches focus primarily on retrieving isolated factual knowledge entities while neglecting the critical reasoning relationships. To address this limitation, Graph-Augmented Generation (GraphRAG) has emerged as an effective solution, which explicitly integrates structured knowledge graphs to support complex reasoning tasks. Although diverse graph construction methods have been explored, they typically rely on static, query-agnostic graphs constructed via fixed heuristics. We are thereby motivated to propose a query-centric retrieval framework that adaptively constructs a graph tailored to each query. However, it is challenging to accurately identify these latent relationships from queries to the corpus. Moreover, unifying multiple local-perspective connections into a globally coherent structured corpus introduces additional complexity. To this end, we introduce HyperRAG, a novel framework in the Hyperbolic space that captures both explicit entity-based links and implicit query-aware connections. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that HyperRAG consistently outperforms existing baselines.

Query-Aware Knowledge Retrieval via Hyperbolic Structuring

Learning high quality sentence embeddings from dialogues has drawn increasing attentions as it is essential to solve a variety of dialogue-oriented tasks with low annotation cost. Annotating and gathering utterance relationships in conversations are difficult, while token-level annotations, \eg, entities, slots and templates, are much easier to obtain. Other sentence embedding methods are usually sentence-level self-supervised frameworks and cannot utilize token-level extra knowledge. We introduce Template-aware Dialogue Sentence Embedding (TaDSE), a novel augmentation method that utilizes template information to learn utterance embeddings via self-supervised contrastive learning framework. We further enhance the effect with a synthetically augmented dataset that diversifies utterance-template association, in which slot-filling is a preliminary step. We evaluate TaDSE performance on five downstream benchmark dialogue datasets. The experiment results show that TaDSE achieves significant improvements over previous SOTA methods for dialogue. We further introduce a novel analytic instrument of semantic compression test, for which we discover a correlation with uniformity and alignment. Our code is available at https://github.com/minsik-ai/Template-Contrastive-Embedding

Template-assisted Contrastive Learning of Task-oriented Dialogue Sentence Embeddings

Recognizing semantic differences across documents is crucial for text generation evaluation and content alignment, especially in cross-lingual settings. However, as a standalone task, it has received little attention. We address this by introducing SwissGov-RSD, the first naturalistic, document-level, cross-lingual dataset for semantic difference recognition. It encompasses a total of 224 multi-parallel documents in English--German, English--French, and English--Italian with token-level difference annotations by human annotators.
We evaluate a variety of open-source and closed-source large language models as well as encoder models across different fine-tuning settings on this new benchmark. 
Our results show that current automatic approaches perform poorly compared to their performance on monolingual, sentence-level, and synthetic benchmarks, revealing a considerable gap for both LLMs and encoder models.

SwissGov-RSD: A Human-annotated, Cross-lingual Benchmark for Token-level Recognition of Semantic Differences Between Related Documents

We propose SemCSE-Multi, a novel unsupervised framework for generating multifaceted embeddings of scientific abstracts, evaluated in the domains of invasion biology and medicine. These embeddings capture distinct, individually specifiable aspects in isolation, thus enabling fine-grained and controllable similarity assessments as well as adaptive, user-driven visualizations of scientific domains. Our approach relies on an unsupervised procedure that produces aspect-specific summarizing sentences and trains embedding models to map semantically related summaries to nearby positions in the embedding space. We then distill these aspect-specific embedding capabilities into a unified embedding model that directly predicts multiple aspect embeddings from a scientific abstract in a single, efficient forward pass. In addition, we introduce an embedding decoding pipeline that decodes embeddings back into natural language descriptions of their associated aspects. Notably, we show that this decoding remains effective even for unoccupied regions in low-dimensional visualizations, thus offering vastly improved interpretability in user-centric settings.

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