United States

Vision-language models (VLMs) increasingly combine visual and textual information to perform complex tasks. However, conflicts between their internal knowledge and external visual input can lead to hallucinations and unreliable predictions. In this work, we investigate the mechanisms that VLMs use to resolve cross-modal conflicts by introducing WHOOPS-AHA!, a dataset of multimodal counterfactual queries that deliberately contradict internal commonsense knowledge. Through logit inspection, we identify a small set of attention heads that mediate this conflict. By intervening in these heads, we can steer the model towards its internal parametric knowledge or the visual information. Our results show that attention patterns on these heads effectively locate image regions that influence visual overrides, providing a more precise attribution compared to gradient-based methods.

ACL 2026

When Seeing Overrides Knowing: Disentangling Knowledge Conflicts in Vision-Language Models

### Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

Message from the General Chair: 
*It is my great pleasure and honor to welcome you to the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025), held in beautiful Vienna, Austria, from July 27 to August 1, 2025. ACL2025continues our field’s 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.* 
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ACL 2025

Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

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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.

Language change both reflects and shapes social processes, and the semantic evolution of foundational concepts provides a measurable trace of historical and social transformation. Despite recent advances in diachronic semantics and discourse analysis, existing computational approaches often (i) concentrate on a single concept or a single corpus, making findings difficult to compare across heterogeneous sources, and (ii) remain confined to surface lexical evidence, offering insufficient computational and interpretive granularity when concepts are expressed implicitly. We propose HistLens, a unified, SAE-based framework for multi-concept, multi-corpus conceptual-history analysis. The framework decomposes concept representations into interpretable features and tracks their activation dynamics over time and across sources, yielding comparable conceptual trajectories within a shared coordinate system. Experiments on long-span press corpora show that HistLens supports cross-concept, cross-corpus computation of patterns of idea evolution and enables implicit concept computation. By bridging conceptual modeling with interpretive needs, HistLens broadens the analytical perspectives and methodological repertoire available to social science and the humanities for diachronic text analysis.

HistLens: Mapping Idea Change across Concepts and Corpora

Industry classification schemes are integral parts of public and corporate databases as they classify businesses based on economic activity. Due to the size of the company registers, manual annotation is costly, and fine-tuning models with every update in industry classification schemes requires significant data collection. We replicate the manual expert verification by using existing or easily retrievable multimodal resources for industry classification. We present MONETA, the first multimodal industry classification benchmark with text (Website, Wikipedia, Wikidata) and geospatial sources (OpenStreetMap and satellite imagery). Our dataset enlists 1,000 businesses in Europe with 20 economic activity labels according to EU guidelines (NACE). Our training-free baseline reaches 62.10% and 74.10% with open and closed-source Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLM). We observe an increase of up to 22.80% with the combination of multi-turn design, context enrichment, and classification explanations. We will release our dataset and the enhanced guidelines.

MONETA: Multimodal Industry Classification through Geographic Information with Multi Agent Systems

Though large language models (LLMs) have enabled great success across a wide variety of tasks, they still appear to fall short of one of the loftier goals of artificial intelligence research: creating an artificial system that can adapt its behavior to radically new contexts upon deployment. One important step towards this goal is to create systems that can induce rich representations of data that are seen in-context, and then flexibly deploy these representations to accomplish goals. Recently, Park et al. 2024 demonstrated that current LLMs are indeed capable of inducing such representation from context (i.e., in-context representation learning). The present study investigates whether LLMs can use these representations to complete simple downstream tasks.

We first assess whether open-weights LLMs can use in-context representations for next-token prediction, and then probe models using a novel task, adaptive world modeling. In both tasks, we find evidence that open-weights LLMs struggle to deploy representations of novel semantics that are defined in-context, even if they encode these semantics in their latent representations. Furthermore, we assess closed-source, state-of-the-art reasoning models on the adaptive world modeling task, demonstrating that even the most performant LLMs cannot reliably leverage novel patterns presented in-context. Overall, this work seeks to inspire novel methods for encouraging models to not only encode information presented in-context, but to do so in a manner that supports flexible deployment of this information.

Language Models Struggle to Use Representations Learned In-Context

The National Violent Death Reporting System (NVDRS) documents suicides in the United States. In a demanding public health data pipeline, annotators manually extract structured information from death investigation records following extensive codebooks (i.e. annotation guidelines) painstakingly developed by experts. In this work, we facilitate data-driven insights from the NVDRS data to support the development of novel suicide interventions by leveraging language models (LM) as assistants to these (a) data annotators and (b) experts. We find that LM predictions match existing data annotations about 85% of the time across 50 NVDRS variables. Where the LM disagrees with existing annotations, our expert review identifies that 38% of these instances reveal inconsistencies between narratives and structured data. Finally, we introduce a human-in-the-loop algorithm that helps experts efficiently build and refine codebooks for new variables by having them only focus on providing feedback for incorrect LM predictions. We apply our algorithm to a real-world case study, and find that about 96K narratives contain evidence of victim interactions with legal professionals, which surfaces a substantial opportunity for upstream intervention that is not captured in the original structured data. Our findings provide evidence that LMs can serve as effective assistants to public health researchers who handle sensitive data in high-stakes scenarios.

Uncovering Intervention Opportunities for Suicide Prevention with Language Model Assistants

Evaluating cross-lingual knowledge transfer in large language models (LLMs) is challenging, as correct answers in a target language may arise either from genuine transfer or from prior exposure during pre-training. We present LiveCLKTBench, an automated generation pipeline specifically designed to isolate and measure cross-lingual knowledge transfer. Our pipeline identifies self-contained, time-sensitive knowledge entities from real-world domains, filters them based on temporal occurrence, and verifies them against the model’s knowledge. The documents of these valid entities are then used to generate factual questions, which are translated into multiple languages to evaluate transferability across linguistic boundaries. Using LiveCLKTBench, we evaluate several LLMs across five languages and observe that cross-lingual transfer is strongly influenced by linguistic distance and often asymmetric across language directions. While larger models improve transfer, the gains diminish with scale and vary across domains. These findings provide new insights into multilingual transfer and demonstrate the value of LiveCLKTBench as a reliable benchmark for future research.

LiveCLKTBench: Towards Reliable Evaluation of Cross-Lingual Knowledge Transfer in Multilingual LLMs

Evaluation of modern large language model (LLM) systems increasingly relies on multi-stage pipelines such as retrieval-augmented generation, tool-using agents, and prompt chains. Reproducing reported evaluation results for these systems often requires evaluation-specific artifacts beyond model weights and datasets, including prompts, judge configurations, retrieval snapshots, and intermediate traces, yet their availability has not been systematically examined.

We introduce \textbf{ReproEvalCard}, a lightweight reporting standard that specifies the minimal artifacts required to reproduce and validate evaluations of LLM pipelines. To motivate this standard, we audit 55 pipeline-based LLM papers published between 2022 and 2025 and quantify the availability of reproducibility-critical evaluation artifacts. We find that randomness controls are missing in 75% of papers and intermediate execution traces in 61%, substantially limiting evaluation reproducibility. We further demonstrate ReproEvalCard through a worked example and provide a concise checklist for authors and reviewers, aiming to improve reproducibility and comparability in LLM evaluation.

ReproEvalCard: A Reporting Standard for Reproducible Evaluation of LLM Pipelines

Deep Research (DR) tools (e.g. OpenAI DR) help researchers cope with ballooning publishing counts. Such tools can synthesize scientific papers to answer researchers' queries, but lack understanding of their users. We change that in MyScholarQA (MySQA), a personalized DR tool that: 1) infers a profile of a user's research interests; 2) proposes personalized actions for a user's input query; and 3) writes a multi-section report for the query that follows user-approved actions. We first test MySQA with NLP's standard protocol: we design a benchmark of synthetic users and LLM judges, where MySQA beats baselines in citation metrics and personalized action-following. However, we suspect this process does not cover all aspects of personalized DR users value, so we interview users in an online version of MySQA to unmask them. We reveal nine nuanced errors of personalized DR undetectable by our LLM judges, and we study qualitative feedback to form lessons for future DR design. In all, we argue for a pillar of personalization that easy-to-use LLM judges can lead NLP to overlook: real progress in personalization is only possible with real users.

Language Models Don’t Know What You Want: Evaluating Personalization in Deep Research Needs Real Users

While Large Language Model-based Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) consistently outperform single-agent systems on complex tasks, their intricate interactions introduce critical reliability challenges arising from communication dynamics and role dependencies. Existing Uncertainty Quantification methods, typically designed for single-turn outputs, fail to address the unique complexities of the MAS. Specifically, these methods struggle with three distinct challenges: the cascading uncertainty in multi-step reasoning, the variability of inter-agent communication paths, and the diversity of communication topologies. To bridge this gap, we introduce MATU, a novel framework that quantifies uncertainty through tensor decomposition. MATU moves beyond analyzing final text outputs by representing entire reasoning trajectories as embedding matrices and organizing multiple execution runs into a higher-order tensor. By applying tensor decomposition, we disentangle and quantify distinct sources of uncertainty, offering a comprehensive reliability measure that is generalizable across different agent structures. We provide comprehensive experiments to show that MATU effectively estimates holistic and robust uncertainty across diverse tasks and communication topologies.

Every Response Counts: Quantifying Uncertainty of LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems through Tensor Decomposition

Evaluating video captioning remains a critical challenge for Visual Large Language Models (VLLMs). Existing metrics primarily rely on matching generated text against ground-truth references. This paradigm suffers from the ``one-to-many'' nature of video description, where high-quality captions are often penalized for lexical mismatches or valid shifts in visual focus. Furthermore, such assessments are typically one-dimensional, failing to provide a fine-grained analysis of caption quality. To address this, we redefine caption quality through the lens of information fidelity: A caption must maximize the coverage of salient visual information while ensuring strict factuality. We introduce CapQuiz, a novel reference-free benchmark that assesses captions based on their utility in answering human-verified, fine-grained, multiple-choice questions derived from the video. CapQuiz features a hierarchical taxonomy of 10 question types (spanning Descriptive and Inferential categories) across 24 diverse video domains. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CapQuiz correlates significantly better with human judgments than existing metrics and offers interpretable insights into model performance. We will release the benchmark to facilitate reproducible research.

Putting Captions to the Test: Evaluating Video Caption Quality through Multiple-Choice Question Answering

Multimodal large language models often struggle with faithful reasoning in complex visual scenes, where intricate entities and relations require precise visual grounding at each step. This reasoning unfaithfulness frequently manifests as hallucinated entities, mis-grounded relations, skipped steps, and over-specified reasoning. Existing preference-based approaches, typically relying on textual perturbations or answer-conditioned rationales, fail to address this challenge as they allow models to exploit language priors to bypass visual grounding. To address this, we propose SceneAlign, a framework that leverages scene graphs as structured visual information to perform controllable structural interventions. By identifying reasoning-critical nodes and perturbing them through four targeted strategies that mimic typical grounding failures, SceneAlign constructs hard negative rationales that remain linguistically plausible but are grounded in inaccurate visual facts. These contrastive pairs are used in Direct Preference Optimization to steer models toward fine-grained, structure-faithful reasoning. Across seven visual reasoning benchmarks, SceneAlign consistently improves answer accuracy and reasoning faithfulness, highlighting the effectiveness of grounding-aware alignment for multimodal reasoning.

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