United States

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to legal domain-specific tasks, evaluating their ability to perform legal work in real-world settings has become essential. However, existing legal benchmarks rely on simplified and highly standardized tasks, failing to capture the ambiguity, complexity, and reasoning demands of real legal practice. Moreover, prior evaluations often adopt coarse, single-dimensional metrics and do not explicitly assess fine-grained legal reasoning. To address these limitations, we introduce PLawBench, a Practical Law Benchmark designed to evaluate LLMs in realistic legal practice scenarios. Grounded in real-world legal workflows, PLawBench models the core processes of legal practitioners through three task categories: public legal consultation, practical case analysis, and legal document generation. These tasks assess a model&#39;s ability to identify legal issues and key facts, perform structured legal reasoning, and generate legally coherent documents. PLawBench comprises 850 questions across 13 practical legal scenarios, with each question accompanied by expert-designed evaluation rubrics, resulting in approximately 12,500 rubric items for fine-grained assessment. Using an LLM-based evaluator aligned with human expert judgments, we evaluate 10 state-of-the-art LLMs. Experimental results show that none achieves strong performance on PLawBench, revealing substantial limitations in the fine-grained legal reasoning capabilities of current LLMs and highlighting important directions for future evaluation and development of legal LLMs. Data is available at: \url{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/PLawbench-B524/}.

ACL 2026

PLAWBENCH: A Rubric-Based Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs in Real-World Legal Practice

## 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.

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to legal domain-specific tasks, evaluating their ability to perform legal work in real-world settings has become essential. However, existing legal benchmarks rely on simplified and highly standardized tasks, failing to capture the ambiguity, complexity, and reasoning demands of real legal practice. Moreover, prior evaluations often adopt coarse, single-dimensional metrics and do not explicitly assess fine-grained legal reasoning. To address these limitations, we introduce PLawBench, a Practical Law Benchmark designed to evaluate LLMs in realistic legal practice scenarios. Grounded in real-world legal workflows, PLawBench models the core processes of legal practitioners through three task categories: public legal consultation, practical case analysis, and legal document generation. These tasks assess a model's ability to identify legal issues and key facts, perform structured legal reasoning, and generate legally coherent documents. PLawBench comprises 850 questions across 13 practical legal scenarios, with each question accompanied by expert-designed evaluation rubrics, resulting in approximately 12,500 rubric items for fine-grained assessment. Using an LLM-based evaluator aligned with human expert judgments, we evaluate 10 state-of-the-art LLMs. Experimental results show that none achieves strong performance on PLawBench, revealing substantial limitations in the fine-grained legal reasoning capabilities of current LLMs and highlighting important directions for future evaluation and development of legal LLMs. Data is available at: \url{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/PLawbench-B524/}.

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.

The gap between existing benchmarks and the dynamic nature of real-world legal practice poses a key barrier to advancing legal intelligence. To this end, we introduce J1-ENVS, the first interactive and dynamic legal environment tailored for LLM-based agents. Guided by legal experts, it comprises six representative scenarios from Chinese legal practices at three levels of environmental complexity. We further introduce J1-EVAL, a dual-metric evaluation framework, designed to assess both task performance and procedural compliance across varying levels of legal proficiency. Extensive experiments on 17 LLM agents reveal that while many models demonstrate solid legal knowledge, they struggle with procedural execution in dynamic settings. Even the SOTA model is below 60% overall performance . These findings highlight persistent challenges in achieving dynamic legal intelligence and offer valuable insights to guide future research.

Ready Jurist One: Benchmarking Language Agents for Legal Intelligence in Dynamic Environments

Graph-related tasks are traditionally addressed with Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) or graph transformers, but their task-specific training limits generalization. Large Language Models (LLMs) offer stronger generalization, yet encoding graphs as one-dimensional text struggles to capture multi-hop dependencies and two-dimensional topology. Vision-Language Models (VLMs) provide an alternative by visualizing graphs, but rendering large graphs in a single image causes clutter, occlusion, and distraction, hindering reasoning. We propose MuSe, a novel multi-stage graph reasoning framework based on VLMs. Instead of processing entire graphs at once, MuSe incrementally samples and visualizes task-relevant subgraphs, enabling progressive reasoning. The framework employs a two-stage training paradigm: supervised fine-tuning to acquire local sampling and reasoning skills, followed by reinforcement learning with GRPO to refine the sampling strategy and control dialog length.To support evaluation, we introduce LGVLQA, a new multimodal dataset with larger and more complex graph structures, addressing the scalability limitations of existing benchmarks. Experiments show that MuSe consistently outperforms leading LLM and VLM baselines, demonstrating improved structural understanding and reasoning ability.

MuSe: Multi-Stage Graph Reasoning via Vision-Language Models

Tool-integrated reasoning (TIR) enables LLM agents to solve tasks through planning, tool use, and iterative revision, but outcome-only reinforcement learning in this setting suffers from sparse, delayed rewards and weak step-level credit assignment. In long-horizon TIR trajectories, an early irrecoverable mistake can determine success or failure, making it crucial to localize the first irrecoverable step and leverage it for fine-grained credit assignment. We propose Error-Localized Policy Optimization (ELPO), which localizes the first irrecoverable step via binary-search rollout trees under a fixed rollout budget, converts the resulting tree into stable learning signals through hierarchical advantage attribution, and applies error-localized adaptive clipping to strengthen corrective updates on the critical step and its suffix. Across TIR benchmarks in math, science QA, and code execution, ELPO consistently outperforms strong Agentic RL baselines under comparable sampling budgets, with additional gains in Pass@K and Major@K scaling, rollout ranking quality, and tool-call efficiency. Our code is publicly released for reproducibility at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ELPO-7C19.

Learning from the Irrecoverable: Error-Localized Policy Optimization for Tool-Integrated LLM Reasoning

Automated prompt optimization is crucial for eliciting reliable reasoning from large language models (LLMs), yet most API-only prompt optimizers iteratively edit monolithic prompts, coupling components and obscuring credit assignment, limiting controllability, and wasting tokens. We propose Adaptive Prompt Structure Factorization (aPSF), an API-only framework (prompt-in/text-out; no access to model internals) that uses an Architect model to discover task-specific prompt structures as semantic factors. aPSF then performs interventional, single-factor updates: interventional factor-level scoring estimates each factor's marginal contribution via validation-performance changes, and error-guided factor selection routes updates to the current dominant failure source for more sample-efficient optimization. Across multiple advanced reasoning benchmarks, aPSF outperforms strong baselines, improving accuracy by up to +4.29 percentage points on average, and reduces optimization cost by 45–87% tokens on MultiArith while reaching peak validation in 1 step.

Adaptive Prompt Structure Factorization: A Framework for Self-Discovering and Optimizing Compositional Prompt Programs

Idiomatic expressions pose a major challenge for multilingual NLP because their meanings shift between figurative and literal usage, often requiring context for accurate interpretation. Prior work has focused on high-resource languages typically evaluates isolated idiom-meaning questions, overlooking realistic discourse. We introduce MIDI, a multilingual idiom dataset spanning 3 high-, 3 medium-, and 12 low-resource languages, curated by native speakers. Unlike previous datasets, MIDI provides idioms embedded in both sentence-level and conversational contexts, capturing both literal and figurative readings. Benchmarking state-of-the-art models shows that idiom comprehension degrades in low-resource languages and that, in all resource tiers, literal interpretations are substantially harder than figurative ones. Conversational context improves performance but does not eliminate these disparities. Through controlled tests and interventions on hidden representations, we further separate memorization from reasoning, exposing core limitations of current models.

 Multilingual Idioms in Sentences and Conversations Across High-, Medium-, and Low-Resource Languages

Author response (rebuttal) writing is a critical stage of scientific peer review that demands substantial author effort. In practice, authors possess domain expertise, author-only information, and response strategies -- concrete forms of author expertise and intent -- and seek NLP assistance that integrates these signals into author response generation (ARG). Yet this author-in-the-loop paradigm lacks formal NLP formulation and systematic study: no dataset provides fine-grained author signals, existing ARG work lacks author inputs and controls, and no evaluation measures response reflection of author signals and effectiveness in addressing reviewer concerns. To fill these gaps, we introduce (i) Re³Align, the first large-scale dataset of aligned review–response–revision triplets, where revisions proxy author signals; (ii) REspGen, an author-in-the-loop ARG framework supporting flexible author input, multi-attribute control, and evaluation-guided refinement; and (iii) REspEval, a comprehensive evaluation suite with 20+ metrics spanning input utilization, controllability, response quality, and discourse. Experiments with SOTA LLMs demonstrate the benefits of author input and evaluation-guided refinement, the impact of input specificity on response quality, and controllability–quality trade-offs. We release our dataset, generation and evaluation tools.

Author-in-the-Loop Response Generation and Evaluation: Integrating Author Expertise and Intent in Responses to Peer Review

We introduce SPUR, a comprehensive benchmark for scientific experimental image perception, understanding, and reasoning, comprising 4,264 question-answering (QA) pairs derived from 1,084 expert-curated images. SPUR features three key innovations: (1) Panel-Level Fine-Grained Perception: evaluating the visual perception of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) across three dimensions (numerical, morphological, and information localization) on six fine-grained panel types; (2) Cross-Panel Relation Understanding: utilizing complex images with an average of 14.3 panels per sample to evaluate MLLMs' ability to decipher intricate cross-panel relations; (3) Expert-Level Reasoning: assessment of qualitative and quantitative reasoning across five experimental paradigms to determine if models can infer conclusions from evidence as human experts do. Comprehensive evaluation of 20 MLLMs and four multimodal Chain-of-Thought (MCoT) methods reveals that current models fall significantly short of the expert-level requirements for scientific image interpretation, underscoring a critical bottleneck in AI for Science (AI4S) research.

Decoding Scientific Experimental Images: The SPUR Benchmark for Perception, Understanding, and Reasoning

We investigate the degree to which human (and LLM) plausibility judgments of multiple-choice commonsense benchmark answers are subject to influence by (im)plausibility arguments for or against an answer, in particular, using rationales generated by LLMs. We collect $3,000$ plausibility judgments from humans and another $13,600$ judgments from LLMs. Overall, we observe increases and decreases in mean human plausibility ratings in the presence of LLM-generated PRO and CON rationales, respectively, suggesting that, on the whole, human judges find these rationales convincing. Experiments with LLMs reveal similar patterns of influence. Our findings demonstrate a novel use of LLMs for studying aspects of human cognition, while also raising practical concerns that, even in domains where humans are ``experts'' (i.e., common sense), LLMs have the potential to exert considerable influence on people's beliefs.

Arguments that Alter Minds: LLM Rationales Sway Human (and LLM) Notions of Plausibility

Agents built on vision-language models increasingly face tasks that demand anticipating future states rather than relying on short-horizon reasoning. Generative world models offer a promising remedy: agents could use them as external simulators to foresee outcomes before acting. This paper empirically examines whether current agents can leverage such world models as tools to enhance their cognition. Across diverse agentic and visual question answering tasks, we observe that some agents rarely invoke simulation (fewer than 1%), frequently misuse predicted rollouts (approximately 15%), and often exhibit inconsistent or even degraded performance (up to 5%) when simulation is available or enforced. Attribution analysis further indicates that the primary bottleneck lies in the agents’ capacity to decide when to simulate, how to interpret predicted outcomes, and how to integrate foresight into downstream reasoning. These findings underscore the need for mechanisms that foster calibrated, strategic interaction with world models, paving the way toward more reliable anticipatory cognition in future agent systems.

Current Agents Fail to Leverage World Model as Tool for Foresight

Chatbot service providers (e.g., OpenAI) rely on tiered subscription plans to generate revenue, offering black-box access to basic models for free users and advanced models to paying subscribers. However, this approach is unprofitable and inflexible. A pay-to-unlock scheme for premium features (e.g., math, coding) offers a more sustainable alternative. Enabling such a scheme requires a feature-locking technique (FLoTE) that is (i) *effective* in refusing locked features, (ii) *utility-preserving* for unlocked features, (iii) *robust* against evasion or unauthorized credential sharing, and (iv) *scalable* to multiple features and clients. Existing FLoTEs (e.g., password-locked models) fail to meet these criteria. To fill this gap, we present Locket, a more *robust and scalable* FLoTE to enable pay-to-unlock schemes. We develop a framework for adversarial training and merging of feature-locking *adapters*, which enables Locket to selectively disable specific features of a model. Evaluation shows that Locket is effective (100% refusal rate), utility-preserving ($\leq$ 7% utility degradation), robust ($\leq$ 5% attack success rate), and scalable to multiple features and clients.

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Ready Jurist One: Benchmarking Language Agents for Legal Intelligence in Dynamic Environments

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