United States

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.

ACL 2026

Uncovering Intervention Opportunities for Suicide Prevention with Language Model Assistants

We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-26 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.

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AAAI 2026

We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

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.

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.

SceneAlign: Aligning Multimodal Reasoning to Scene Graphs in Complex Visual Scenes

Federated fine-tuning enables privacy-preserving LLM adaptation but faces a critical bottleneck: the disparity between LLMs' high memory demands and edge devices' limited capacity. To break the memory barrier, we propose Chain Federated Fine-tuning (ChainFed), an innovative paradigm that forgoes end-to-end updates in favor of a sequential, layer-by-layer manner. It first trains the initial adapter to convergence, freezes its weights, and then proceeds to the next. This iterative train-and-freeze process forms an optimization chain, gradually enhancing the model's task-specific proficiency. ChainFed further integrates three core techniques: 1) Dynamic Layer Co-Tuning to bridge semantic gaps between sequentially tuned layers and facilitate information flow; 2) Globally Perceptive Optimization to endow each adapter with foresight beyond its local objective; 3) Function-Oriented Adaptive Tuning to automatically identify the optimal fine-tuning starting point. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of ChainFed over existing methods, boosting average accuracy by up to 46.46%.

Beyond End-to-End: Dynamic Chain Optimization for Private LLM Adaptation on the Edge

Multiple-choice cloze questions are commonly used to assess linguistic proficiency and comprehension. However, generating high-quality distractors remains challenging, as existing methods often lack adaptability and control over difficulty levels, and the absence of difficulty-annotated datasets further hinders progress. To address these issues, we propose a novel framework for generating distractors with controllable difficulty by leveraging both data augmentation and a multitask learning strategy. First, to create a high-quality, difficulty-annotated dataset, we introduce a two-way distractor generation process to produce diverse and plausible distractors. These candidates are filtered and then categorized by difficulty using an ensemble QA system. Second, this newly created dataset is used to train a difficulty-controllable generation model via multitask learning. Experimental results demonstrate that our method generates high-quality distractors across difficulty levels and substantially outperforms GPT-4o in aligning distractor difficulty with human perception.

Difficulty-Controllable Cloze Question Distractor Generation

Effective code generation requires both model capability and a problem representation that carefully structures how models reason and plan. Existing approaches augment reasoning steps or inject specific structure into how models think, but leave scattered problem conditions unchanged. Inspired by the way humans organize fragmented information into coherent explanations, we propose StoryCoder, a narrative reformulation framework that transforms code generation questions into coherent natural language narratives, providing richer contextual structure than simple rephrasings. Each narrative consists of three components: a task overview, constraints, and example test cases, guided by the selected algorithm and genre. Experiments across 11 models on HumanEval, LiveCodeBench, and CodeForces demonstrate consistent improvements, with an average gain of 18.7% in zero-shot pass@10. Beyond accuracy, our analyses reveal that narrative reformulation guides models toward correct algorithmic strategies, reduces implementation errors, and induces a more modular code structure. The analyses further show that these benefits depend on narrative coherence and genre alignment, suggesting that structured problem representation is important for code generation regardless of model scale or architecture. Our code is available at https://github.com/gu-ni/StoryCoder.

StoryCoder: Narrative Reformulation for Structured Reasoning in LLM Code Generation

Knowledge-intensive visual question answering (VQA) requires external knowledge beyond image content, demanding precise visual grounding and coherent integration of visual and textual information. Although multimodal retrieval-augmented generation has achieved notable advances by incorporating external knowledge bases, existing approaches largely adopt single-pass frameworks that often fail to acquire sufficient knowledge and lack mechanisms to revise misdirected reasoning. We propose PMSR (Progressive Multimodal Search and Reasoning), a framework that progressively constructs a structured reasoning trajectory to enhance both knowledge acquisition and synthesis. PMSR uses dual-scope queries conditioned on both the latest record and the trajectory to retrieve diverse knowledge from heterogeneous knowledge bases. The retrieved evidence is then synthesized into compact records via compositional reasoning. This design facilitates controlled iterative refinement, which supports more stable reasoning trajectories with reduced error propagation. Extensive experiments across six diverse benchmarks (Encyclopedic-VQA, InfoSeek, MMSearch, LiveVQA, FVQA, and OK-VQA) demonstrate that PMSR consistently improves both retrieval recall and end-to-end answer accuracy.

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

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