United States

Pragmatic inference is inherently graded. Different lexical items give rise to pragmatic enrichment to different degrees. Scalar implicature exemplifies this property through scalar diversity, where implicature strength varies across scalar items. However, evaluations of pragmatic inference in large language models (LLMs) often rely on prompt-based manipulations. Beyond prompt-level effects, this study introduces Continuous Interpretive Steering (CIS), a method that probes graded pragmatic interpretation by treating activation-level steering strength as a continuous experimental variable. To support this analysis, this study introduces a new dataset, GraSD, which encodes graded scalar diversity. Experiments on four LLMs show that uniform activation steering increases pragmatic interpretations globally but collapses item-level variation, whereas graded activation steering yields differentiated interpretive shifts aligned with scalar diversity grades. Together, CIS and GraSD provide a principled framework for evaluating graded pragmatic sensitivity in LLMs.

ACL 2026

Continuous Interpretive Steering for Scalar Diversity

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.

technical paper

Existing multi-LLM collaboration systems often encounter scalability challenges when integrating new LLMs and tasks, leading to suboptimal performance. To address this, we propose SMCS, a Scalable Multi-LLM Collaboration System designed to effectively coordinate multiple open-source LLMs. The system consists of two core components: a Retrieval-based Prior Selection (RPS) module, which dynamically selects the most suitable LLMs for each input, and an Exploration–Exploitation-Driven Posterior Enhancement (EPE) module, which fosters response diversity and selects high-quality outputs through a hybrid scoring mechanism. Experiments on eight mainstream benchmarks validate the effectiveness of our system: by integrating fifteen open-source LLMs, SMCS outperforms prevailing closed-source LLMs, e.g., GPT-4.1(**+5.36%**) and GPT-o3-mini(**+5.28%**) across multiple tasks. Remarkably, it even exceeds the average of best results on different datasets with open-source LLMs (**+2.86%**), significantly advancing the empirical performance frontier of open-source collaboration. The code is released at https://github.com/magent4aci/SMCS.

A Scalable Multi-LLM Collaboration System with Retrieval-based Selection and Exploration-Exploitation-Driven Enhancement

Autoregressive decoding inherently limits the inference throughput of Large Language Model (LLM) due to its sequential dependency. Speculative decoding mitigates this by verifying multiple predicted tokens in parallel, but its efficiency remains constrained by what we identify as verification heterogeneity—the uneven difficulty of verifying different speculative candidates. In practice, a small subset of high-confidence predictions accounts for most successful verifications, yet existing methods treat all candidates uniformly, leading to redundant computation. We present **HeteroSpec**, a **hetero**geneity-adaptive **spec**ulative decoding framework that allocates verification effort in proportion to candidate uncertainty. HeteroSpec estimates verification complexity using a lightweight entropy-based quantifier, partitions candidates via a data-driven stratification policy, and dynamically tunes speculative depth and pruning thresholds through coordinated optimization. Across five benchmarks and four LLMs, HeteroSpec delivers an average **4.24×** decoding speedup over state-of-the-art methods such as EAGLE-3, while preserving exact output distributions. Crucially, HeteroSpec requires no model retraining and remains compatible with other inference optimizations, making it a practical direction for improving speculative decoding efficiency.

HeteroSpec: Leveraging Contextual Heterogeneity for Efficient Speculative Decoding

Long-video understanding is bottlenecked by the high cost of processing massive visual tokens. Current reduction strategies often rely on static allocation or inefficient in-network selection that disrupts optimized attention kernels. In this paper, we introduce Vista-LLM, a decoupled framework for query-guided visual token pruning. By filtering redundancy prior to inference with minimal overhead, Vista-LLM ensures full compatibility with Flash Attention. Our method employs a coarse-to-fine pipeline: (1) Query-Guided Dynamic Budgeting for adaptive temporal allocation; (2) a lightweight Semantic Scout for fine-grained, query-specific selection; and (3) Structure-Aware Compensation to preserve global context. Extensive experiments on benchmarks like Video-MME and MLVU demonstrate a significantly improved Pareto frontier. Notably, on LLaVA-OneVision, Vista-LLM reduces visual tokens by 90\% and accelerates inference while retaining over 98\% of baseline performance on average, effectively filtering visual noise.

Vista-LLM: Decoupled Query-Guided Visual Token Pruning for Efficient Long-Video Large Language Models

Despite the rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs), uncertainty quantification in LLM generation is a persistent challenge. Although recent approaches have achieved strong performance by restricting LLMs to produce short or constrained answer sets, many real-world applications require long-form and free-form text generation. A key difficulty in this setting is that LLMs often produce responses that are semantically coherent yet factually inaccurate, while the underlying semantics are multifaceted and the linguistic structure is complex. To tackle this challenge, this paper introduces Interrogative Uncertainty Quantification (IUQ), a novel framework that leverages inter-sample consistency and intra-sample faithfulness to quantify the uncertainty in long-form LLM outputs. By utilizing an interrogate-then-respond paradigm, our method provides reliable measures of claim-level uncertainty and the model's faithfulness. Experimental results across diverse model families and model sizes demonstrate the superior performance of IUQ over two widely used long-form generation datasets.

IUQ: Interrogative Uncertainty Quantification for Long-Form Large Language Model Generation

As LLM-based agents are increasingly used in long-term interactions, cumulative memory is critical for enabling personalization and maintaining stylistic consistency. However, most existing systems adopt an "all-or-nothing" approach to memory usage: incorporating all relevant past information can lead to Memory Anchoring, where the agent is trapped by past interactions, while excluding memory entirely results in under-utilization and the loss of important interaction history. We show that an agent's reliance on memory can be modeled as an explicit and user-controllable dimension. We first introduce a behavioral metric of memory dependence to quantify the influence of past interactions on current outputs. We then propose Steerable Memory Agent, SteeM, a framework that allows users to dynamically regulate memory reliance, ranging from a fresh-start mode that promotes innovation to a high-fidelity mode that closely follows interaction history. Experiments across different scenarios demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms conventional prompting and rigid memory masking strategies, yielding a more nuanced and effective control for personalized human-agent collaboration.

Controllable Memory Usage: Balancing Anchoring and Innovation in Long-Term Human–Agent Interaction

Recent large language models (LLMs) perform strongly on mathematical benchmarks yet often misapply lemmas, importing conclusions without validating assumptions. We formalize lemma‑judging as a structured prediction task: given a statement and a candidate lemma, the model must output a precondition check and a conclusion‑utility check, from which a usefulness decision is derived. We present RULES, which encodes this specification via a two‑section output and trains with reinforcement learning plus section‑aware loss masking to assign penalty to the section responsible for errors. Training and evaluation draw on diverse natural‑language and formal proof corpora; robustness is assessed with a held‑out perturbation suite; and end‑to‑end evaluation spans competition‑style, perturbation‑aligned, and theorem-based problems across various LLMs. Results show consistent in‑domain gains over both a vanilla model and a single‑label RL baseline, larger improvements on applicability‑breaking perturbations, and parity or modest gains on end‑to‑end tasks; ablations indicate that the two‑section outputs and section‑aware reinforcement are both necessary for robustness.

Reliable Use of Lemmas via Eligibility Reasoning and Section‑Aware Reinforcement Learning

Large language models increasingly require structured inference, from enforcing JSON schema to multilingual parsing, where outputs must satisfy complex constraints. We introduce MetaJuLS, a meta-reinforcement learning approach that learns universal constraint propagation policies applicable across languages and tasks without task-specific retraining. By formulating structured inference as adaptive constraint propagation and training a Graph Attention Network with meta-learning, MetaJuLS achieves 1.5-2.0× speedups over GPU-optimized baselines while maintaining an accuracy within 0.2% of that of state-of-the-art parsers. On Universal Dependencies across 10 languages and LLM-constrained generation (LogicBench, GSM8K-Constrained), MetaJuLS demonstrates rapid cross-domain adaptation: a policy trained on English parsing adapts to new languages and tasks with 5--10 gradient steps (5--15 seconds) rather than requiring hours of task-specific training. Mechanistic analysis reveals that the policy employs human-like parsing strategies (easy-first) and novel, non-intuitive heuristics. By reducing the number of propagation steps in LLM deployments, MetaJuLS contributes to Green AI by directly reducing the inference carbon footprint.

Adaptive Constraint Propagation: Scaling Structured Inference for Large Language Models via Meta-Reinforcement Learning

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting combined with few-shot in-context learning (ICL) has unlocked significant reasoning capabilities in large language models (LLMs). However, ICL with CoT examples is ineffective on novel tasks when the pre-training knowledge is insufficient. We study this problem in a controlled setting using the CoT-ICL Lab framework, and propose meta-training techniques to learn novel abstract reasoning tasks in-context. Although CoT examples facilitate reasoning, we noticed that their excessive inclusion during meta-training degrades performance when CoT supervision is limited. To mitigate such behavior, we propose CoT-Recipe, a formal approach to modulate the mix of CoT and non-CoT examples in meta-training sequences. We demonstrate that careful modulation via CoT-Recipe can increase the accuracy of transformers on novel tasks by up to 300% even when there are no CoT examples available in-context. We confirm the broader effectiveness of these techniques by applying them to pretrained LLMs (Qwen2.5 series) for symbolic reasoning tasks and observing gains of up to 130% in accuracy.

To Think or Not to Think: The Hidden Cost of Meta-Training with Excessive CoT Examples

Evaluating recommender systems remains challenging due to the gap between offline metrics and real user behavior, as well as the scarcity of interaction data. Recent work explores large language model (LLM) agents as synthetic users, yet they typically rely on few-shot prompting, which yields a shallow understanding of the environment and limits their ability to faithfully reproduce user actions. We introduce AlignUSER, a framework that learns world-model-driven agents from human interactions. Given rollout sequences of actions and states, we formalize world modeling as a next state prediction task that helps the agent internalize the environment. To align actions with human personas, we generate counterfactual trajectories around demonstrations and prompt the LLM to compare its decisions with human choices, identify suboptimal actions, and extract lessons. The learned policy is then used to drive agent interactions with the recommender system. We evaluate AlignUSER across multiple datasets and demonstrate closer alignment with genuine humans than prior work, both at the micro and macro levels.

AlignUSER: Human-Aligned LLM Agents via World Models for Recommender System Evaluation

Paraphrasing uses different words, sentence structures, or expressions to convey similar semantics. It is an effective training data augmentation method to improve low-resource Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. Existing studies normally leverage parallel corpora to construct parabanks, regarding the Machine Translation (MT) results of source sentences as the paraphrases of the corresponding target sentences. As MT models are usually trained on the same parallel corpus, translation of the training set may suffer from overfitting, which leads to less diverse paraphrases. Training paraphrasers on the parabank generated via MT may also suffer from the information loss issue, as the parabank is derived from the parallel corpora, and the knowledge inside the parabank is a subset of that inside the parallel corpora. In this paper, we train bidirectional Multilingual Neural Machine Translation (MNMT) on the bi-directional bilingual parallel corpus, and use the MNMT model directly as a paraphrasing model by asking it to generate "translations" of the input language. As some source tokens also appear in the translation in the parallel corpus, we introduce "copy"/"not-copy" tags to indicate the existence/non-existence of source tokens in the target translation during training, and use the "not-copy" tag to encourage paraphrasing during inference. Manual and automatic evaluation results show that our ParaMNMT method can generate paraphrases of higher semantic consistency, literal fluency and sentential diversity compared to existing parabanks and LLMs. Our data augmentation experiments verify the effectiveness of ParaMNMT on improving low-resource NLP tasks.

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