United States

Large Language Models (LLMs) can extend their parameter knowledge limits by adopting the Tool-Integrated Reasoning (TIR) paradigm. However, existing LLM-based agent training framework often focuses on answers&#39; accuracy, overlooking specific alignment for behavior patterns. Consequently, agent often exhibits ineffective actions during TIR tasks, such as redundant and insufficient tool calls. How to calibrate erroneous behavioral patterns when executing TIR tasks, thereby exploring effective trajectories, remains an open-ended problem. In this paper, we propose ET-Agent, a training framework for calibrating agent&#39;s tool-use behavior through two synergistic perspectives: Self-evolving Data Flywheel and Behavior Calibration Training. Specifically, we introduce a self-evolutionary data flywheel to generate enhanced data, used to fine-tune LLM to improve its exploration ability. Based on this, we implement an two-phases behavior-calibration training framework. It is designed to progressively calibrate erroneous behavioral patterns to optimal behaviors. Further in-depth experiments confirm the superiority of ET-Agent across multiple dimensions, including correctness, efficiency, reasoning conciseness, and tool execution accuracy. Our ET-Agent framework provides practical insights for research in the TIR field. Codes can be found in ~\url{https://github.com/RUC-NLPIR/ET-Agent}

ACL 2026

ET-Agent: Incentivizing Effective Tool-Integrated Reasoning Agent via Behavior Calibration

#### *Message from the General Chair, Aline Villavicencio*
I’m delighted and honoured to welcome you to the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL 2026), taking place in the beautiful city of Rabat, in Morocco, in March 24-29, 2026. EACL is the flagship European conference of the Association and EACL 2026 proudly continues our field’s tradition of excellence in scholarship, innovation, and inclusivity. I am deeply grateful to the many volunteers whose dedication, generosity, and tireless efforts have made this conference possible.
For the first time EACL is being hosted in the African continent. This is an important milestone for our community, and we are grateful to our Moroccan hosts for enabling this historic moment by bringing this edition of EACL to Rabat. We are also delighted that the Second Arabic NLP School is co-located with EACL. We hope attendees enjoy this wonderful opportunity to strengthen ties with the Computational Linguistics communities across the African continent. *[Read full message](https://drive.google.com/file/d/14NlmHvwM6fPJuMmOvVh7K0vtQbEyv3SZ/view?usp=sharing)*<br><br>

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EACL 2026

Welcome to the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL). EACL 2026 will be held in Rabat, Morocco, from March 24–29, 2026. 

Large Language Models (LLMs) can extend their parameter knowledge limits by adopting the Tool-Integrated Reasoning (TIR) paradigm. However, existing LLM-based agent training framework often focuses on answers' accuracy, overlooking specific alignment for behavior patterns. Consequently, agent often exhibits ineffective actions during TIR tasks, such as redundant and insufficient tool calls. How to calibrate erroneous behavioral patterns when executing TIR tasks, thereby exploring effective trajectories, remains an open-ended problem. In this paper, we propose ET-Agent, a training framework for calibrating agent's tool-use behavior through two synergistic perspectives: Self-evolving Data Flywheel and Behavior Calibration Training. Specifically, we introduce a self-evolutionary data flywheel to generate enhanced data, used to fine-tune LLM to improve its exploration ability. Based on this, we implement an two-phases behavior-calibration training framework. It is designed to progressively calibrate erroneous behavioral patterns to optimal behaviors. Further in-depth experiments confirm the superiority of ET-Agent across multiple dimensions, including correctness, efficiency, reasoning conciseness, and tool execution accuracy. Our ET-Agent framework provides practical insights for research in the TIR field. Codes can be found in ~\url{https://github.com/RUC-NLPIR/ET-Agent}

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. <br>
[Full Message from General Chair Philipp Koehn](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QiJFOmMjvDgsDo3i1XzlQnImxe3RU_Cy/view?usp=sharing) <br><br><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.

Early Long-context Document Visual Question Answering (DocVQA) methods struggle with preserving visual semantics or handling finite context windows. Conversely, recent RAG-based approaches suffer from "semantic gaps" and "structural disconnections" due to passive retrieval mechanisms that ignore logical dependencies. To address these challenges, we introduce TRACE (Traversal Retrieval-Augmented Chain of Evidence). By navigating a Bi-Layered Graph that encodes both physical adjacency and semantic relevance, TRACE transforms retrieval from static matching into adaptive evidence chain construction. Furthermore, we propose M5BookVQA, a benchmark designed to assess deep, multi-hop reasoning in books, addressing the limitations of existing datasets. Extensive experiments show that TRACE achieves an average accuracy improvement of 14.07\% on M5BookVQA and exhibits robust generalization with a 13.38\% gain across four established benchmarks. Our source code is available at https://github.com/shimurenhlq/TRACE.

TRACE: Traversal Retrieval-Augmented Chain of Evidence for Document Understanding

Motion sensor time-series are central to Human Activity Recognition (HAR), yet conventional approaches are constrained to fixed activity sets and typically require costly parameter retraining to adapt to new behaviors. While Large Language Models (LLMs) offer promising open-set reasoning capabilities, applying them directly to numerical time-series often leads to hallucinations and weak grounding. To address this challenge, we propose ZARA (Zero-training Activity Reasoning Agents), a knowledge- and retrieval-augmented agentic framework for motion time-series reasoning in a training-free inference setting. Rather than relying on black-box projections, ZARA distills reference data into a statistically grounded textual knowledge base that transforms implicit signal patterns into verifiable natural-language priors. Guided by retrieved evidence, ZARA iteratively selects discriminative cues and performs grounded reasoning over candidate activities. Extensive experiments on eight benchmarks show that ZARA generalizes robustly to unseen subjects and across datasets, demonstrating strong transferability across heterogeneous sensor domains. These results mark a step toward trustworthy, plug-and-play motion understanding beyond dataset-specific artifacts. Our code is available at https://github.com/zechenli03/ZARA.

ZARA: Training-Free Motion Time-Series Reasoning via Evidence-Grounded LLM Agents

Despite recent progress, existing agent benchmarks neglect a fundamental real-world capability: hierarchical rule application, a critical requirement in fields such as law and medicine where agents must reason from broad categories down to specific exceptions to reach rule-compliant decisions.
This introduces significant challenges in resolving logical dependencies and disambiguating vague boundaries.
To bridge this gap, we introduce HSCodeComp, a novel benchmark derived from e-commerce, requiring agents to assign a unique 10-digit Harmonized System (HS) Code to products by aligning their fuzzy attributes with strict tariff classification rules.
HSCodeComp comprises 632 realistic products across 32 categories, featuring detailed yet noisy product information (titles, attributes, and images). The HS Codes are annotated by a panel of 26 tariff experts, strictly adhering to official rules and an empirical knowledge base, both of which we jointly open-source.
Through a comprehensive evaluation of 23 LLMs, VLMs, and agents on HSCodeComp, we demonstrate that: 1) a substantial performance gap remains between state-of-the-art agents and human experts (46.8% vs. 95.0%); and 2) test-time scaling fails to close this gap. 
Further analysis reveals that 1) excessive reasoning steps frequently induce ``reasoning drift,'' which degrades accuracy; and 2) agents are prone to premature decisions on high-level categories and reasoning hallucinations that lack factual grounding.

HSCodeComp: A Realistic and Expert-level Agent Benchmark for Hierarchical Rule Application

Autoregressive language models are trained exclusively left-to-right. We explore the complementary factorization, training right-to-left at scale, and ask what reasoning patterns emerge when a model conditions on future context to predict the past.
We train LEDOM, an open-source purely reverse autoregressive language model (2B/7B parameters, 435B tokens), and find it develops capabilities distinct from forward models, including abductive inference, question synthesis, and structural handling of the reversal curse.
We then explore one application of the reverse model: combining forward likelihood $P(y \mid x)$ with reverse posterior $P(x \mid y)$ through noisy channel duality. We propose Reverse Reward, which reranks forward outputs using reverse posterior estimates, and prove that bidirectional scoring penalizes hallucinated reasoning chains whose backward reconstruction degrades.
Reverse Reward yields gains of up to 6.6% on AIME 2024 and 15% on AMC 2023 across multiple strong baselines. We release all codes at https://github.com/Arvid-pku/LEDOM.

LEDOM: Reverse Language Model

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has long been a promising paradigm for enhancing large language models (LLMs) with external knowledge. Traditional embedding-based methods for graph construction can capture semantic similarity but struggle to establish fine-grained, interpretable logical relationships. Recently, Graph-enhanced RAG (GraphRAG) has gained increasing popularity for its capability in modeling logical relationships. However, graph construction requires extensive token consumption for triple extraction and summarization, making it costly and slow. Accordingly, we propose MeshRAG, a novel framework for mining efficient structures via hashing to enhance RAG. We adopt an inductive paradigm in which global graph structure emerges from local hash collisions rather than explicit symbolic extraction. By replacing neural embedding search with lightweight and bitwise operations, MeshRAG automates a simple and rapid graph construction process. Furthermore, the hash collision mechanism provides transparent evidence for logical connections and retrieval decisions. Experimental results show that MeshRAG outperforms existing baselines, while its graph construction requires no GPU resources or token budget and can structure over ten thousand chunks in a few minutes.

Collision to Cognition: Hash-Driven Graph Construction for Efficient RAG

Generative audio modeling has largely been fragmented into specialized tasks, text-to-speech (TTS), text-to-music (TTM), and text-to-audio (TTA), each operating under heterogeneous control paradigms. Unifying these modalities remains a fundamental challenge due to the intrinsic dissonance between structured semantic representations (speech/music) and unstructured acoustic textures (sound effects). In this paper, we introduce \textbf{UniSonate}, a unified flow-matching framework capable of synthesizing speech, music, and sound effects through a standardized, reference-free natural language instruction interface. To reconcile structural disparities, we propose a novel dynamic token injection mechanism that projects unstructured environmental sounds into a structured temporal latent space, enabling precise duration control within a phoneme-driven Multimodal Diffusion Transformer (MM-DiT). Coupled with a multi-stage curriculum learning strategy, this approach effectively mitigates cross-modal optimization conflicts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UniSonate achieves state-of-the-art performance in instruction-based TTS (WER 1.47%) and TTM (SongEval Coherence 3.18), while maintaining competitive fidelity in TTA. Crucially, we observe \textit{positive transfer}, where joint training on diverse audio data significantly enhances structural coherence and prosodic expressiveness compared to single-task baselines.

UniSonate: A Unified Model for Speech, Music, and Sound Effect Generation with Text Instructions

There is a growing consensus that, in order to serve as models of human language processing, language models (LMs) need to be constrained in their use of memory for context, the analogue to human working memory (WM). Here we take a novel yet simple approach to constraining WM in language models, in a way that reflects models of human cognition where memory is treated as a limited resource and deployed strategically. In order to capture this constraint on memory encoding, we inject noise into the hidden representations of Transformer-based LMs at tunable rates. Then we train the models with a hybrid objective, such that they learn to maximize the performance of next-word prediction subject to explicit constraints on the total encoding precision. We find that explicit WM constraints improve the model's alignment with human reading times. More importantly, we find that the need to manage encoding precision reshapes the nature of the models' context representations, making them more compressed and categorical. Our results show how resource-rational models of WM allocation can be implemented in neural models simply and successfully, and point to a dissociation between WM retrieval mechanisms and the underlying memory representations in models of human sentence processing.

Memory efficiency and resource-rational encoding in sentence processing

To reliably interpret the evolving context of an LLM as a reasoning trace, the underlying belief of the LLM needs to transition consistently with the progression of the context.
We focus on evaluating whether the beliefs held by a model remain consistent before and after the extension of the context.
Previous research on consistency evaluation typically uses datasets with ground-truth answers, which is problematic because task-solving ability acts as a confounding factor, obscuring the direct evaluation of consistency.
Furthermore, evaluating cases where inconsistency stems from multiple errors poses difficulties.
We propose a new evaluation method to assess the consistency of LLMs in a multiple-choice question answering format, designed so that any option chosen is correct, allowing for the evaluation of the proposed belief consistency.
It also supports isolation of errors such as reasoning failures and biases.
We reveal that the belief consistency does not improve solely with model size scaling,
whereas continual pre-training on code and mathematics text improves it.
Furthermore, models trained on code and mathematics text show a seemingly contradictory result of increased logical failures, indicating that belief consistency and superficial consistency are not necessarily directly linked.

Assessing the Belief Consistency of Large Language Models on the Logical Conversation Process

Real-time AI experiences call for on-device large language models (OD-LLMs) optimized for efficient deployment on resource-constrained hardware. The most useful OD-LLMs produce near-real-time responses and exhibit broad hardware compatibility, maximizing user reach. We present a methodology for designing such models using hardware-in-the-loop architecture search under mobile latency constraints. This system is amenable to industry-scale deployment: it generates models deployable without custom kernels and compatible with standard mobile runtimes like Executorch. Our methodology avoids specialized attention mechanisms and instead uses attention skipping for long-context acceleration. 


Our approach jointly optimizes model architecture (layers, dimensions) and attention pattern. To efficiently evaluate candidates, we treat each as a pruned version of a pretrained backbone with inherited weights, thereby achieving high accuracy with minimal continued pretraining. We leverage the low cost of latency evaluation in a staged process: learning an accurate latency model first, then searching for the Pareto-frontier across latency and quality.


This yields MobileLLM-Flash, a family of foundation models (350M, 650M, 1.4B) for efficient on-device use with strong capabilities, supporting up to 8k context length. MobileLLM-Flash delivers up to 1.8x and 1.6x faster prefill and decode on mobile CPUs with comparable or superior quality. Our analysis of Pareto-frontier design choices offers actionable principles for OD-LLM design.

MobileLLM-Flash: Latency-Guided On-Device LLM Design for Industry Scale Deployment

Layer-aligned distillation and convergence-based early exit represent two predominant computational efficiency paradigms for transformer inference; yet we establish that they exhibit fundamental incompatibility under standard deployment conditions for convergence-based early exit. Distillation objectives that align intermediate student layers to teacher representations suppress the representational convergence that early-exit mechanisms exploit, rendering such mechanisms ineffective on distilled models.


We introduce LEAP (Layer-wise Exit-Aware Pretraining), an auxiliary training objective that reconciles this incompatibility. LEAP requires no architectural modifications; it augments standard distillation with a single constraint ensuring intermediate layers approximate final-layer representations. LEAP-MiniLM achieves $1.61\times$ measured wall-clock speedup (batch $= 1$, NVIDIA L4) at $\theta = 0.95$, with $91.9\%$ of samples exiting by layer 7 and $1.80\times$ theoretical layer reduction, where standard distilled models achieve zero effective speedup. We validate across sentence similarity (STS-B: $0.760 \pm 0.006$) and retrieval benchmarks (BEIR), providing operational guidance including latency measurements, decision thresholds, and deployment criteria.

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