United States

What is the interplay between semantic representations learned by language models (LM) from surface form alone to those learned from more grounded evidence? We study this question for a scenario where part of the input comes from a different modality---in our case, in a vision-language model (VLM), where a pretrained LM is aligned with a pretrained image encoder. As a case study we focus on the task of predicting hypernyms of objects represented in images. We do so in a VLM setup where the image encoder and LM are kept frozen, and only the intermediate mappings are learned. We progressively deprive the VLM of explicit evidence for hypernyms, and test whether the knowledge is recoverable from the LM. We find that the LMs we study can recover this knowledge and generalize even in the most extreme version of this experiment (when the model receives no evidence of a hypernym during training). Additional experiments suggest that this cross-modal taxonomic generalization persists under counterfactual image–label mappings only when the counterfactual data have high visual similarity within each category. Taken together, these findings suggest that cross-modal generalization in LMs arises from an interaction between linguistic structure and the information present in the input.

ACL 2026

Cross-Modal Taxonomic Generalization in (Vision-) Language Models

## Welcome to EMNLP 2022!
I am delighted to welcome you to EMNLP 2022! I believe this conference has been complicated beyond any precedent. Over the past year, it’s been thrilling to see the organization team approach each new puzzle with creativity and enthusiasm. We hope that those participating in Abu Dhabi as well as those joining remotely will leave the conference feeling newly inspired by the program and newly connected to our ever-growing community. Following EMNLP 2021 and major NLP conferences since, EMNLP 2022 is “hybrid,” serving both virtual and in-person participants.

Our key innovations for EMNLP 2022 include:

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* Familiar from NAACL but new to EMNLP, we’ve added an industry track.
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EMNLP 2022 will take place in Abu Dhabi from December 7th to December 11th, 2022. And it will be held in hybrid mode, both online and offline.

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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.

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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.

Large language models still struggle with reliable long-term conversational memory: simply enlarging context windows or applying naïve retrieval often introduces noise and destabilizes responses. We present APEX-MEM, a conversational memory system that combines three key innovations: (1) a property graph which use domain-agnostic ontology to structure conversations as temporally grounded events in an entity-centric framework, (2) append-only storage that preserves the full temporal evolution of information, and (3) a multi-tool retrieval agent that understands and resolves conflicting or evolving information at query time, producing a compact and contextually relevant memory summary. This retrieval-time resolution preserves the full interaction history while suppressing irrelevant details. APEX-MEM achieves 88.88% accuracy on LOCOMO and 86.2% on LongMemEval, outperforming state-of-the-art session-aware approaches and demonstrating that structured property graphs enable more temporally coherent long-term conversational reasoning.

APEX-MEM: Agentic Semi-Structured Memory with Temporal Reasoning for Long-Term Conversational AI

Despite significant advances in large language models (LLMs), their knowledge memorization capabilities remain underexplored, due to the lack of standardized and high-quality testing grounds.
In this paper, we introduce a novel, real-world and large-scale knowledge injection benchmark that continuously evolves without human intervention.
Specifically, we propose WikiDYK, which leverages recently-added and expert-curated facts from Wikipedia's ``Did You Know...'' entries.
Each entry is converted into multiple question–answer pairs spanning diverse task formats from easy cloze prompts to complex multi-hop questions.
WikiDYK currently contains $12,290$ facts and $77,180$ questions, and its design allows for seamless extension with future updates from Wikipedia editors.
Through extensive experiments using continued pre-training, we reveal a surprising insight:
despite their prevalence in modern LLMs, Causal Language Models (CLMs) demonstrate significantly weaker knowledge memorization capabilities compared to Bidirectional Language Models (BiLMs), exhibiting a $23$% lower accuracy in terms of reliability.
To compensate for the smaller scales of current BiLMs, we introduce a modular collaborative framework utilizing ensembles of BiLMs as external knowledge repositories to integrate with LLMs. Experiment shows that this framework further improves the reliability accuracy by up to $29.1$%. Code: \url{https://github.com/zhang-yu-wei/WikiDYK}.

Bidirectional LMs are Better Knowledge Memorizers? A Benchmark for Real-world Knowledge Injection

Automated Fact-Checking has largely focused on verifying general knowledge against static corpora, overlooking high-stakes domains like law where truth is evolving and technically complex. We introduce CaseFacts, a benchmark for verifying colloquial legal claims against U.S. Supreme Court precedents. Unlike existing resources that map formal texts to formal texts, CaseFacts challenges systems to bridge the semantic gap between layperson assertions and technical jurisprudence while accounting for temporal validity. The dataset consists of 6,294 claims categorized as Supported, Refuted, or Overruled. We construct this benchmark using a multi-stage pipeline that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to synthesize claims from expert case summaries, employing a novel semantic similarity heuristic to efficiently identify and verify complex legal overrulings. Experiments with state-of-the-art LLMs reveal that the task remains challenging; notably, augmenting models with unrestricted web search degrades performance compared to closed-book baselines due to the retrieval of noisy, non-authoritative precedents. We release CaseFacts to spur research into legal fact verification systems.

CaseFacts: A Benchmark for Legal Fact-Checking and Precedent Retrieval

Proactive task-oriented agents must autonomously anticipate user needs, identify actionable opportunities, and trigger software actions at appropriate moments—fundamentally shifting from reactive systems that await explicit instructions. However, existing approaches lack generalizable end-to-end solutions for measuring and optimizing such anticipatory behaviors.

This paper introduces ProActor, a unified framework for conversational task scheduling that integrates: (1) a domain-agnostic automated annotation methodology that enables scalable proactiveness reinforcement learning (RL) by generating full opportunity time windows instead of rigid point labels, (2) systematic proactiveness metrics capturing both timing quality and reference action alignment, and (3) RL optimization using GRPO with various reward designs. Our insight is that RULER-based rewards with proactiveness rubrics are crucial for improving timing quality, and that proactiveness optimization enabled by stage-aware composite rewards is key to balancing timing quality and reference action alignment.

Furthermore, we introduce ART-F, an adaptive RL framework that combines request-adaptive inference clusters with asynchronous training for better GPU utilization, enabling LoRA training of 4-bit Qwen2.5-14B-ProActor-Q4 models on 4×H200 and 8×H100 GPUs with substantial speedups. Experiments on two newly auto-annotated datasets demonstrate significant improvements in proactive timing while maintaining action consistency comparable to state-of-the-art baselines. Ablations validate the effectiveness of distinct composite reward variations.

ProActor: Timing-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Proactive Task Scheduling Agents

In this paper, we observe that current models are susceptible to reward hacking, leading to a substantial overestimation of a model's reasoning ability. 
This is evidenced by a high incidence of ``false positives''—solutions that reach the correct answer through an unsound process.
Through a systematic analysis with human verification, we establish a taxonomy of these failure modes, identifying patterns like Miracle Steps—abrupt jumps to a correct output without a valid preceding derivation. 
Probing experiments suggest that these Miracle Steps are linked to answer-recall shortcuts, including memorization from pretraining, where the model accesses the correct answer independently of its reasoning chain.
To mitigate this systemic issue, we introduce the Rubric Reward Model (RRM), a process-oriented reward function that evaluates the entire reasoning trajectory against problem-specific rubrics.
The RRM explicitly penalizes logical flaws and encourages rigorous deduction.
When integrated into an RL pipeline, RRM-based training consistently outperforms outcome-only supervision across four math benchmarks.
Notably, it boosts Verified Pass@1024 on AIME2024 from 26.7\% to 62.6\% and reduces the incidence of Miracle Steps by 71\%.
Our work demonstrates that rewarding the solution process is crucial for building accurate and reliable models.

Curing Miracle Steps in LLM Mathematical Reasoning with Rubric Rewards

The Linux kernel is a critical system, serving as the foundation for numerous systems. Bugs in the Linux kernel can cause serious consequences, affecting billions of users. Fault localization (FL), which aims at identifying the buggy code elements in software, plays an essential role in software quality assurance. While recent LLM agents have achieved promising accuracy in FL on recent benchmarks like SWE-bench, it remains unclear how well these methods perform in the Linux kernel, where FL is much more challenging due to the large-scale code base, limited observability, and diverse impact factors. In this paper, we introduce LinuxFLBench, a FL benchmark constructed from real-world Linux kernel bugs. We conduct an empirical study to assess the performance of state-of-the-art LLM agents on the Linux kernel. Our initial results reveal that existing agents struggle with this task, achieving a best top-1 accuracy of only 41.6% at file level. To address this challenge, we propose LinuxFL+, an enhancement framework designed to improve FL effectiveness of LLM agents for the Linux kernel. LinuxFL+ substantially improves the FL accuracy of all studied agents (e.g., 7.2% - 11.2% accuracy increase) with minimal costs.

Taming System Complexity: Demystifying Software Engineering Agents in Diagnosing Linux Kernel Faults

Knowledge distillation (KD) transfers capabilities from large language models (LLMs) to smaller students, yet it can fail unpredictably and also underpins model leakage risks. Our analysis revealed several distillation traps: tail noise, off-policy instability, and, most fundamentally, the teacher–student gap, that distort training signals. These traps manifest as overconfident hallucinations, self-correction collapse, and local decoding degradation, causing distillation to fail. Motivated by these findings, we propose a post-hoc calibration method that, to the best of our knowledge, for the first time enables control over a teacher's distillability via reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT). Our objective combines task utility, KL anchor, and across-tokenizer calibration reward. This makes distillability a practical safety lever for foundation models, connecting robust teacher–student transfer with deployment-aware model protection. Experiments across math, knowledge QA, and instruction-following tasks show that students distilled from distillable calibrated teachers outperform SFT and KD baselines, while undistillable calibrated teachers retain their task performance but cause distilled students to collapse, offering a practical knob for both better KD and model IP protection.

Distillation Traps and Guards: A Calibration Knob for LLM Distillability

Diffusion models promise efficient parallel text generation but rely on bidirectional attention, creating a structural mismatch with pre-trained Autoregressive (AR) models. This incompatibility precludes reusing robust AR priors, necessitating prohibitive pre-training from scratch. To bridge this gap, we propose FLUID, a framework that efficiently adapts AR backbones to the diffusion paradigm. By enforcing Strictly Causal Alignment, FLUID enables seamless initialization from standard GPT-style checkpoints, circumventing the need for massive pre-training. Furthermore, we introduce Elastic Horizons, an entropy-driven mechanism that dynamically modulates denoising strides based on local information density rather than fixed schedules. Experiments demonstrate that FLUID achieves state-of-the-art performance while reducing training costs by orders of magnitude, effectively reconciling established AR foundations with efficient parallel generation. Our code is available at https://huggingface.co/MYTH-Lab/FLUID.

From AR to Diffusion: Efficiently Adapting Large Language Models with Strictly Causal and Elastic Horizons

There is a significant gap in evaluating cultural reasoning in LLMs using conversational datasets that capture culturally rich and dialectal contexts. Most Arabic benchmarks focus on short text snippets in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), overlooking the cultural nuances that naturally arise in dialogues. To address this gap, we introduce ArabCulture-Dialogue, a culturally grounded conversational dataset covering 13 Arabic-speaking countries, in both MSA and each country's respective dialect, spanning 12 daily-life topics and 54 fine-grained subtopics. We utilize the dataset to form three benchmarking tasks: (i) multiple-choice cultural reasoning, (ii) machine translation between MSA and dialects, and (iii) dialect-steering generation. Our experiments indicate that the performance gap between MSA and Arabic dialects still exists, whereby the models perform worse on all three tasks in the dialectal setup, compared to the MSA one.

Cultural Benchmarking of LLMs in Standard and Dialectal Arabic Dialogues

Augmenting Large Language Models (LLMs) with external tools enables them to execute complex, multi-step tasks. However, tool learning is hampered by the static synthetic data pipelines, where data generation and model training are executed as two separate, non-interactive processes. This approach fails to focus on the model's specific weaknesses adaptively and allows noisy labels to persist, degrading training efficiency. We introduce \textbf{LoopTool}, a fully automated, model-aware data evolution framework that closes this loop by tightly integrating data synthesis and model training. LoopTool iteratively evolves both the data and the model through three synergistic modules: (1) \textit{Greedy Capability Probing (GCP)} diagnoses the model's mastered and failed capabilities; (2) \textit{Judgement-Guided Label Verification (JGLV)} uses an open-source judge model to find and correct annotation errors, progressively purifying the dataset; and (3) \textit{Error-Driven Data Expansion (EDDE)} generates new, challenging samples based on identified failures. This closed-loop process is tightly integrated with reinforcement learning training and operates within a cost-efficient, open-source ecosystem, thereby eliminating reliance on costly APIs. Experiments show that LoopTool-8B significantly surpasses its 32B data generator and achieves new state-of-the-art results on the BFCL-v3 and ACEBench benchmarks for its scale. Our work demonstrates that closed-loop, self-refining data pipelines can dramatically enhance the tool-use capabilities of LLMs.

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APEX-MEM: Agentic Semi-Structured Memory with Temporal Reasoning for Long-Term Conversational AI

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