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The ``LLM-as-a-judge&#39;&#39; paradigm has become a standard method for evaluating open-ended generation. To address the quadratic scalability costs of pairwise comparisons, popular benchmarks like Arena-Hard and AlpacaEval compare all models against a single anchor. However, despite its widespread use, the impact of anchor selection on the reliability of the results remains largely unexplored. In this work, we systematically investigate the effect of anchor selection by evaluating 22 different anchors on the Arena-Hard-v2.0 dataset. We find that the choice of anchor is critical: a poor anchor can dramatically reduce correlation with human rankings. We identify that common anchor choices (best-performing and worst-performing models) make poor anchors. Because these extreme anchors are consistently better or worse than all other models, they are seldom indicative of the relative ranking of the models. We further quantify the effect size of anchor selection, showing it is comparable to the selection of a judge model. We conclude with actionable recommendations. First, we conduct a power analysis, and compute sufficient benchmark sizes for anchor-based evaluation, finding that standard benchmark sizes are insufficient for pairwise evaluation and fail to distinguish between competitive models reliably. Second, we provide guidelines for selecting informative anchors to ensure reliable and efficient evaluation practices.

ACL 2026

Mediocrity is the key for LLM as a Judge Anchor Selection

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-23 is the Thirty-Seventh AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The theme of this conference is to create collaborative bridges within and beyond AI. Like previous AAAI conferences, AAAI-23 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and two new activities: a Bridge Program and a Lab Program. Many of these activities are tailored to the theme of bridges and all are selected according to the highest standards, with additional programs for students and young researchers. 
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AAAI 2023

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.

The ``LLM-as-a-judge'' paradigm has become a standard method for evaluating open-ended generation. To address the quadratic scalability costs of pairwise comparisons, popular benchmarks like Arena-Hard and AlpacaEval compare all models against a single anchor. However, despite its widespread use, the impact of anchor selection on the reliability of the results remains largely unexplored. In this work, we systematically investigate the effect of anchor selection by evaluating 22 different anchors on the Arena-Hard-v2.0 dataset. We find that the choice of anchor is critical: a poor anchor can dramatically reduce correlation with human rankings. We identify that common anchor choices (best-performing and worst-performing models) make poor anchors. Because these extreme anchors are consistently better or worse than all other models, they are seldom indicative of the relative ranking of the models. We further quantify the effect size of anchor selection, showing it is comparable to the selection of a judge model. We conclude with actionable recommendations. First, we conduct a power analysis, and compute sufficient benchmark sizes for anchor-based evaluation, finding that standard benchmark sizes are insufficient for pairwise evaluation and fail to distinguish between competitive models reliably. Second, we provide guidelines for selecting informative anchors to ensure reliable and efficient evaluation practices.

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. 
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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.

Code agents are increasingly trusted to autonomously fix bugs on platforms such as GitHub, yet their security evaluation focuses almost exclusively on functional correctness. In this paper, we reveal a novel type of threat to real-world code-agents: functionally correct yet vulnerable (FCV) patches, which pass all test cases but contain vulnerable code. With our proposed FCV-Attack, we demonstrate that SOTA LLMs (e.g., ChatGPT and Claude) and agent scaffolds (e.g., SWE-agent and OpenHands) are all vulnerable to this FCV threat; across 12 agent-model combinations on SWE-Bench, the attack only requires black-box access and a single query to the code agent to perform the attack. For example, for CWE-538 (information exposure vulnerability), the FCV-Attack attains an attack success rate of 40.7% on GPT-5 Mini + OpenHands. Our results reveal an important security threat overlooked by current evaluation paradigms and urge the development of security-aware defenses for code agents.

When "Correct" Is Not Safe: Can We Trust Functionally Correct Patches Generated by Code Agents?

Web agents struggle to adapt to new websites due to the scarcity of environment specific tasks and demonstrations. Recent works have explored synthetic data generation to address this challenge, however, they suffer from data quality issues where synthesized tasks contain hallucinations that cannot be executed, and collected trajectories are noisy with redundant or misaligned actions. In this paper, we propose SynthAgent, a fully synthetic supervision framework that aims at improving synthetic data quality via dual refinement of both tasks and trajectories. Our approach begins by synthesizing diverse tasks through categorized exploration of web elements, ensuring efficient coverage of the target environment. During trajectory collection, tasks are refined only when conflicts with observations are detected, which mitigates hallucinations while preserving task consistency. After collection, we conduct trajectory refinement with global context to mitigate potential noise or misalignments. Finally, we fine-tune open-source web agents on the refined synthetic data to adapt them to the target environment. Experimental results demonstrate that SynthAgent outperforms existing synthetic data methods, validating the importance of high-quality synthetic supervision. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/aiming-lab/SynthAgent.

SynthAgent: Adapting Web Agents with Synthetic Supervision

Multiple-choice question answering (MCQA) is standard in NLP, but benchmarks lack rigorous quality control. We present BenchMarker, an education-inspired toolkit using LLM judges to flag three common MCQ flaws: 1) contamination—items appearing exactly online; 2) shortcuts—cues in the choices that enable guessing; and 3) writing errors—structural/grammatical issues based on a 19-rule education rubric. We validate BenchMarker with human annotations, then run the tool to audit 12 benchmarks, revealing: 2) contaminated MCQs tend to inflate accuracy, while writing errors tend to lower it and change rankings beyond random; and 3) prior benchmark repairs address their targeted issues (i.e., lowering accuracy with LLM-written distractors), but inadvertently add new flaws (i.e. implausible distractors, many correct answers). Overall, flaws in MCQs degrade NLP evaluation, but education research offers a path forward. We release BenchMarker to bridge the fields and improve MCQA benchmark design.

BenchMarker: An Education-Inspired Toolkit for Highlighting Flaws in Multiple-Choice Benchmarks

Effective and efficient access to relevant information is essential for disaster management. However, no retrieval model is specialized for disaster management, and existing general-domain models fail to handle the varied search intents inherent to disaster management scenarios, resulting in inconsistent and unreliable performance. To this end, we introduce DMRetriever, the first series of dense retrieval models (33M to 7.6B) tailored for this domain. It is trained through a novel three-stage framework of bidirectional attention adaptation, unsupervised contrastive pre-training, and difficulty-aware progressive instruction fine-tuning, using high-quality data generated through an advanced data refinement pipeline. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that DMRetriever achieves state-of-the-art performance across all six search intents at every model scale. Moreover, DMRetriever is highly parameter-efficient, with 596M model outperforming baselines over 13.3 larger and 33M model exceeding baselines with only 7.6% of their parameters. All codes, data, and checkpoints are available at https://github.com/KaiYin97/DMRETRIEVER.

DMRetriever: A Family of Models for Improved Text Retrieval in Disaster Management

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in natural language processing by encoding extensive knowledge, but their utility relies on timely updates as human knowledge keeps evolving. 
In this paper, we investigate the problem of LLM knowledge updates, which requires simultaneously unlearning unwanted information and learning new knowledge. 
Existing approaches that tackle unlearning and learning separately encounter *task conflicts* and *knowledge management issues* when applied to comprehensive knowledge updates.
In this paper, we validate our findings with theoretical analysis and empirical evidence, and propose LOKA, a conflict-aware framework for Large language mOdel Knowledge updAtes. 
During training, LOKA introduces an adaptive knowledge memory approach in which updated knowledge is allocated across multiple memory units. 
During inference, LOKA retrieves the most relevant memory unit from the knowledge memory and integrates it with the original LLM to apply updated knowledge, while a learning-based router controls the activation of the knowledge memory to improve knowledge utilization. 
Extensive experiments demonstrate the efficacy of LOKA in achieving accurate, flexible, and conflict-aware knowledge updates.

LOKA: Conflict-Aware LLM Knowledge Update with Adaptive Knowledge Memory

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown immense potential in Knowledge Graph Completion (KGC), yet bridging the modality gap between continuous graph embeddings and discrete LLM tokens remains a critical challenge. While recent quantization-based approaches attempt to align these modalities, they typically treat quantization as flat numerical compression, resulting in semantically entangled codes that fail to mirror the hierarchical nature of human reasoning. In this paper, we propose GS-Quant, a novel framework that generates semantically coherent and structurally stratified discrete codes for KG entities. Unlike prior methods, GS-Quant is grounded in the insight that entity representations should follow a linguistic coarse-to-fine logic. We introduce a Granular Semantic Enhancement module that injects hierarchical knowledge into the codebook, ensuring that earlier codes capture global semantic categories while later codes refine specific attributes. Furthermore, a Generative Structural Reconstruction module imposes causal dependencies on the code sequence, transforming independent discrete units into structured semantic descriptors. By expanding the LLM vocabulary with these learned codes, we enable the model to reason over graph structures isomorphically to natural language generation. Experimental results demonstrate that GS-Quant significantly outperforms existing text-based and embedding-based baselines.

GS-Quant: Granular Semantic and Generative Structural Quantization for Knowledge Graph Completion

Models employing long chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning have shown superior performance on complex reasoning tasks. Yet, this capability introduces a critical and often overlooked inefficiency---overthinking---models often engage in unnecessarily extensive reasoning even for simple queries, incurring significant computations without accuracy improvements. While prior work has explored solutions to mitigate overthinking, a fundamental gap remains in our understanding of its underlying causes. Most existing analyses are limited to superficial, profiling-based observations, failing to delve into LLMs' inner workings. This study introduces a systematic, fine-grained analyzer of LLMs' thought process to bridge the gap, TRACE. We first benchmark the overthinking issue, confirming that long-thinking models are five to twenty times slower on simple tasks with no substantial gains. We then use TRACE to first decompose the thought process into minimally complete sub-thoughts. Next, by inferring discourse relationships among sub-thoughts, we construct granular thought progression graphs and subsequently identify common thinking patterns for topically similar queries. Our analysis reveals two major patterns for open-weight thinking models---Explorer and Late Landing. This finding provides evidence that over-verification and over-exploration are the primary drivers of overthinking in LLMs. Grounded in thought structures, we propose a utility-based definition of overthinking, which moves beyond length-based metrics. This revised definition offers a more insightful understanding of LLMs' thought progression, as well as practical guidelines for principled overthinking management.

Do LLMs Really Need 10+ Thoughts for “Find the Time 1000 Days Later”? Towards Structural Understanding of LLM Overthinking

Zero-shot reasoning on text-rich networks (TRNs) remains a challenging frontier, as models must integrate textual semantics with relational structure without task-specific supervision. While graph neural networks rely on fixed label spaces and supervised objectives, recent large language model (LLM)-based approaches often overlook graph context or depend on distillation from larger models, limiting generalisation. We propose TRN-R1-Zero, a post-training framework for TRN reasoning trained solely via reinforcement learning. TRN-R1-Zero directly optimises base LLMs using a Neighbour-aware Group Relative Policy Optimisation objective that dynamically adjusts rewards based on a novel margin gain metric for the informativeness of neighbouring signals, effectively guiding the model toward relational reasoning. Unlike prior methods, TRN-R1-Zero requires no supervised fine-tuning or chain-of-thought data generated from large reasoning models. Extensive experiments across citation, hyperlink, social and co-purchase TRN benchmarks demonstrate the superiority and robustness of TRN-R1-Zero. Beyond cross-domain transfer, TRN-R1-Zero, trained solely on node-level tasks, further generalises to edge- and graph-level tasks in a zero-shot manner. The codebase is open-source at [https://github.com/superallen13/TRN-R1-Zero](https://github.com/superallen13/TRN-R1-Zero).

TRN-R1-Zero: Text-rich Network Reasoning via LLMs with Reinforcement Learning Only

Large language models (LLMs) excel at function calling, but inference scaling has been explored mainly for unstructured generation. We propose an inference-scaling framework for structured outputs that combines fine-grained beam search with ToolPRM, a process reward model scoring each intra-call decision (function name and argument filling). We build the first fine-grained intra-call supervision dataset via function masking, rollout collection, and step-level annotation. ToolPRM outperforms outcome and coarse-grained reward models in predictive accuracy and yields consistent test-time gains on multiple function-calling benchmarks. We further show that structured generation follows ``explore more but retain less'', since early JSON errors are unrecoverable.

ToolPRM: Fine-Grained Inference Scaling of Structured Outputs for Function Calling

Transfer learning has demonstrated efficacy in single-property constraint molecular generation. However, real-world drug discovery demands molecules to satisfy multiple property constraints. Existing paradigms often struggle with this challenge due to catastrophic forgetting or gradient conflicts. To address this, we propose a conflict-aware molecular language model merging framework (CAML). CAML generates multiple constraints molecular as a cooperative game among property-specific fine-tune models (expert models). Specifically, we formulate a Stability-Aware Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy (SACMA-ES) to dynamically optimize the fusion strategy. This algorithm searches for a Nash-equilibrium–like solution that minimizes conflicts among properties by exploring the optimal combination of the importance of the task parameter (intrinsic scale) and relative fusion weights of each expert (fusion coefficient), yielding a multi-constraint molecular property generation model without revisiting the training data. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CAML achieves state-of-the-art performance in complex multi-constraint scenarios. Our results validate that this training-free paradigm offers a robust and efficient solution for resolving intrinsic property conflicts in de novo molecular design.

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