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Puns are a common form of rhetorical wordplay that exploits polysemy and phonetic similarity to create humor. In multimodal puns, visual and textual elements synergize to ground the literal sense and evoke the figurative meaning simultaneously. Although Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are widely used in multimodal understanding and generation, their ability to understand puns has not been systematically studied due to a scarcity of rigorous benchmarks. To address this, we first propose a multimodal pun generation pipeline. We then introduce MultiPun, a dataset comprising diverse types of puns alongside adversarial non-pun distractors. Our evaluation reveals that most models struggle to distinguish genuine puns from these distractors. Moreover, we propose both prompt-level and model-level strategies to enhance pun comprehension, with an average improvement of 16.5% in F1 scores. Our findings provide valuable insights for developing future VLMs that master the subtleties of human-like humor via cross-modal reasoning.

ACL 2026

“I See What You Did There”: Can Large Vision-Language Models Understand Multimodal Puns?

## 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.

poster

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.

Tokenizers play a critical role in large language model studies. Despite recent advances, existing tokenizers fail to explicitly leverage historical tokenization results when making subsequent token decisions, nor do they selectively utilize such history based on contextual relevance. We propose SPEAK, a tokenizer that integrates spiking neurons to explicitly leverage historical tokenization results. Furthermore, we introduce an entropy-aware reset mechanism that selectively leverages history based on contextual relevance, which is determined by token-level entropy. High-entropy tokens are treated as contextual boundaries, whereas low-entropy tokens between consecutive such boundaries exhibit strong contextual relevance. Accordingly, we induce hard reset at high-entropy tokens to discard irrelevant historical tokenization results, and soft reset at low-entropy tokens to preserve and leverage relevant history. Experiments on 2 language models and 5 datasets spanning 16 languages demonstrate superior cross-lingual adaptability, with competitive performance and efficiency. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/zju-bmi-lab/SPEAK.

SPEAK: Spiking Neurons as an Entropy-Aware Tokenizer for Large Language Models

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) is a promising approach for enhancing agentic search. However, its performance is often hindered by reward sparsity, whereby agents receive very limited positive feedback despite incurring significant exploration costs. In this paper, we formalize this challenge as a new research problem termed **Reward Density Optimization**, which aims to improve the reward obtained per unit of exploration cost. To address this problem, we introduce InfoFlow, a systematic framework that operates along three complementary dimensions: 1) **Sub-goal Scaffolding**: which decomposes long-horizon tasks into intermediate objectives and assigns process-level rewards to provide denser learning signals; 2) **Pathfinding Hints**: which injects corrective guidance into stalled trajectories to increase the ratio of successful trials; and 3) **Dual-agent Refinement**: which employs a dual-agent architecture to offload the cognitive burden of deep exploration. We evaluate InfoFlow on several popular agentic search benchmarks, where it significantly outperforms strong baselines and enables lightweight LLMs to achieve performance comparable to that of advanced proprietary models.

Reinforcing Agentic Search Via Reward Density Optimization

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are vulnerable to jailbreak attacks, which can elicit harmful responses from MLLMs. Many MLLMs support multi-image inputs, inadvertently introducing new vulnerabilities due to less efforts on multi-image safety alignment. Previous MLLM jailbreak methods only uses a single image, which restricts the attack space: they cannot distribute harmful requests across multiple images, carry abundant information, or exploit additional visual reasoning tasks to distract MLLMs. To address these limitations, in this paper, we propose a compositional jailbreak framework, $\textbf{DMN}$, which leverages $\textbf{D}$istributed instruction, $\textbf{M}$ultimodal evidence and a $\textbf{N}$umber chain task to fully enhance the jailbreak performance. Extensive experiments show that DMN is highly effective for MLLM jailbreaking, e.g. achieving attack success rates of over 90% on GPT-4o, Gemini-2.5-pro and Claude Sonnet 4, surpassing other baselines by a large margin. This compositional, multi-image jailbreak strategy reveals fundamental weaknesses in their safety mechanisms.

DMN: A Compositional Framework for Jailbreaking Multimodal LLMs with Multi-Image Inputs

While Chain-of-Thought empowers Large Vision-Language Models with multi-step reasoning, explicit textual rationales suffer from an information bandwidth bottleneck, where continuous visual details are discarded during discrete tokenization. Recent latent reasoning methods attempt to address this challenge, but often fall prey to premature semantic collapse due to rigid autoregressive objectives. In this paper, we propose Laser, a novel paradigm that reformulates visual deduction via Dynamic Windowed Alignment Learning. Instead of forcing a point-wise prediction, Laser aligns the latent state with a dynamic validity window of future semantics. This mechanism enforces a "Forest-before-Trees" cognitive hierarchy, enabling the model to maintain a probabilistic superposition of global features before narrowing down to local details. Crucially, Laser maintains interpretability via decodable trajectories while stabilizing unconstrained learning via Self-Refined Superposition. Extensive experiments on 6 benchmarks demonstrate that Laser achieves state-of-the-art performance among latent reasoning methods, surpassing the strong baseline Monet by 5.03% on average. Notably, it achieves these gains with extreme efficiency, reducing inference tokens by more than 97%, while demonstrating robust generalization to out-of-distribution domains.

Forest Before Trees: Latent Superposition for Efficient Visual Reasoning

Hybrid offline–online reinforcement learning (O2O RL) promises both sample efficiency and robust exploration, but suffers from instability due to distribution shift between offline and online data. We introduce RLPD-GX, a framework that decouples policy optimization from safety enforcement: a reward-seeking learner explores freely, while a projection-based guardian guarantees rule-consistent execution and safe value backups. This design preserves the exploratory value of online interactions without collapsing to conservative policies. To further stabilize training, we propose dynamic curricula that gradually extend temporal horizons and anneal offline–online data mixing. We prove convergence via a contraction property of the guarded Bellman operator, and empirically show state-of-the-art performance on Atari-100k, achieving a normalized mean score of 3.02 (+45% over prior hybrid methods) with stronger safety and stability. Beyond Atari, ablations demonstrate consistent gains across safety-critical and long-horizon tasks, underscoring the generality of our design. Extensive and comprehensive results highlight decoupled safety enforcement as a simple yet principled route to robust O2O RL, suggesting a broader paradigm for reconciling exploration and safety in reinforcement learning.

Provably Safe Offline-to-Online RL: Decoupling Learning from Data-Driven Safety Enforcement

Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve strong performance on many reasoning benchmarks, yet these evaluations typically focus on isolated tasks that differ from real-world usage in task-oriented dialogue (TOD). In this setting, LLMs must perform reasoning inherently while generating text and adhering to instructions on role, format, and style. This mismatch raises concerns about whether benchmark performance accurately reflects models’ reasoning robustness in TOD setting.

We investigate how framing reasoning tasks within TOD affects LLM performance by introducing a new dynamic benchmark covering eight travel-related tasks that require arithmetic, spatial, temporal, and commonsense reasoning. Each problem is presented in both isolated and dialogue-based variants, enabling controlled comparison while mitigating data contamination. Experiments on nine LLMs reveal a substantial and consistent performance gap between isolated and dialogue settings. Through ablations and qualitative analysis, we show that this gap is largely driven by the multi-turn nature of dialogue, with additional effects from role conditioning and tool-use requirements. Our results highlight the need to evaluate LLM reasoning in realistic interactive scenarios.

Reasoning Gets Harder for LLMs Inside A Dialogue

Small LLMs often struggle to match the agentic capabilities of large, costly models. While reinforcement learning can help, progress has been limited by two structural bottlenecks: existing open-source agentic training data are narrow in task variety and easily solved; real-world APIs lack diversity and are unstable for large-scale reinforcement learning rollout processes. We address these challenges with SYNTHAGENT, a framework that jointly synthesizes diverse tool-use training data and simulates complete environments. Specifically, a strong teacher model creates novel tasks and tool ecosystems, then rewrites them into intentionally underspecified instructions. This compels agents to actively query users for missing details. When handling synthetic tasks, an LLM-based user simulator provides user-private information, while a mock tool system delivers stable tool responses. For rewards, task-level rubrics are constructed based on required subgoals, user-agent interactions, and forbidden behaviors. Across 14 challenging datasets in math, search, and tool use, models trained on our synthetic data achieve substantial gains, with small models showing performance comparable to some larger baselines in certain domains.

 Mock Worlds, Real Skills: Building Small Agentic Language Models with Synthetic Tasks, Simulated Environments, and Rubric-Based Rewards

Stereotype bias in language models has been widely examined in English, but remains largely understudied in bilingual contexts where multiple linguistic and cultural systems interact. This gap is especially important in regions where language use reflects complex historical and sociopolitical influences. In this work, we focus on Kazakhstan, a bilingual society where Kazakh, a low-resource Turkic language, and Russian, a high-resource Slavic language, are both actively used and frequently code-mixed in everyday communication. We introduce Aqbileq, a high-quality, human-verified dataset consisting of 5,634 stereotype-bearing statements in Kazakh, Russian, and code-mixed forms, covering six culturally salient domains. We evaluate both multilingual and Kazakh-specific language models using perplexity-based scoring and pretraining simulations, and find that stereotype bias is most pronounced in code-mixed inputs. Our results highlight the limitations of existing evaluation frameworks and emphasize the need for culturally grounded, linguistically inclusive benchmarks to better assess and mitigate bias in language models.

Stereotype Bias in a Bilingual Setting: A Culturally Grounded Evaluation in Kazakhstan

LLM-based code agents treat repositories as unstructured text, applying edits through brittle string matching that frequently fails due to formatting drift or ambiguous patterns. We propose reframing the codebase as a structured action space where agents operate on named AST entities rather than text spans. Our framework, CodeStruct, provides readCode for retrieving complete syntactic units and editCode for applying syntax-validated transformations to semantic program elements. Evaluated on SWE-Bench Verified across six LLMs, CodeStruct improves Pass@1 accuracy by 1.2-5.0% while reducing token consumption by 12-38% for most models. Models that frequently fail to produce valid patches under text-based interfaces benefit most: GPT-5-nano improves by 20.8% as empty-patch failures drop from 46.6% to 7.2%. On CodeAssistBench, we observe consistent accuracy gains (+0.8-4.4%) with cost reductions up to 33%. Our results show that structure-aware interfaces offer a more reliable foundation for code agents.

CODESTRUCT: Code Agents over Structured Action Spaces

Anchoring bias causes large language models (LLMs) to shift quantitative judgments in response to irrelevant numerical primes. We analyze this bias as a function of model confidence and accuracy in base, instruction-tuned, and distilled variants of Llama and Qwen models. We find that anchoring susceptibility is negatively correlated with model confidence without regard to accuracy: confidently incorrect models resist anchoring as effectively as accurate ones, provided their internal priors are sufficiently strong. We further show that post-training impacts the strength of this relationship, and that models are more susceptible to high anchors than to low anchors. Our findings suggest anchoring resistance is a structural property of distributional concentration (certainty) rather than knowledge correctness (factual accuracy), with implications for deploying LLMs in numerical reasoning tasks.

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SPEAK: Spiking Neurons as an Entropy-Aware Tokenizer for Large Language Models

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