United States

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.

ACL 2026

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

### 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.

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.

CAML: A Conflict-Aware Molecular Language Model Merging Framework for Multi-Constraint Molecular Generation

Effective medical text retrieval requires both high accuracy and low latency. While LLM-based embedding models possess powerful retrieval capabilities, their prohibitive latency and high computational cost limit their application in real-time scenarios. Furthermore, the lack of comprehensive and high-fidelity benchmarks hinders progress in Chinese medical text retrieval. In this work, we introduce the **C**hinese **Med**ical **T**ext **E**mbedding **B**enchmark (**CMedTEB**), a benchmark spanning three kinds of practical embedding tasks: retrieval, reranking, and semantic textual similarity (STS). Distinct from purely automated datasets, CMedTEB is curated via a rigorous multi-LLM voting pipeline validated by clinical experts, ensuring gold-standard label quality while effectively mitigating annotation noise. On this foundation, we propose the **C**hinese Medical **A**symmetric **RE**triever (**CARE**), an asymmetric architecture that pairs a lightweight BERT-style encoder for online query encoding with a powerful LLM-based encoder for offline document encoding. However, optimizing such an asymmetric retriever with two structurally different encoders presents distinctive challenges. To address this, we introduce a novel two-stage training strategy that progressively bridges the query and document representations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CARE surpasses state-of-the-art symmetric models on CMedTEB, achieving superior retrieval performance without increasing inference latency.

Benchmarking and Enabling Efficient Chinese Medical Retrieval via Asymmetric Encoders

Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely used in high-stakes applications, making their interpretability increasingly important. Existing interpretability methods are typically categorized into internal and external perspectives, which are often studied in isolation and tend to overlook two key aspects: causality and temporal dynamics. Explanations are often limited to surface correlations or static dependencies, failing to capture how influences evolve during autoregressive generation. To address these limitations, we propose a causal and dynamic interpretability framework for LLM generation. We first characterize the backdoor-adjusted causal effects of both the generated prefix and the prompt on the current token using the Structural Causal Model. Next, we introduce two metrics to quantify contextual causal influence and question–answer causal influence. Overall, our work provides a unified causal view of internal consistency and external alignment in LLM generation dynamics.

Bridging Internal Consistency and External Alignment: A Causal and Dynamic Interpretability Framework for LLM Generation

Multi-hop question answering requires retrieving and integrating evidence from multiple contexts. Despite the rapid progress of current research, multi-hop reasoning remains constrained by two persistent limitations: attention decay, where the model's focus on main question degrades as the reasoning chain grows, and error accumulation, where mistakes propagate across hops and compounds into final failure. Inspired by Theta-Gamma hierarchical oscillation which decouples global planning from local retrieval, enabling efficient attention transfer between hops and a verification and repair mechanism that interrupts the accumulation of errors in the wrong paths, we present **THOR**, a brain-inspired Theta-Gamma hierarchical oscillatory reasoning framework. Extensive comparative experiments and specific validation experiments on multi-hop QA benchmarks demonstrate that THOR improves answer accuracy and robustness while mitigating limitations, showcasing its generalization across different backbones.

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

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Which of These Best Describes Multiple Choice Evaluation with LLMs? A) Forced B) Flawed C) Fixable D) All of the Above