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While Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly advanced the fluency of Emotional Support Conversation (ESC) systems, current research predominantly focuses on engineering increasingly complex architectures—from intricate reasoning chains to multi-agent collaborations. While these advancements (e.g., CoT) offer semantic traces of reasoning, they remain mechanistically opaque, obscuring the fundamental causal mechanisms between dialogue features and effective empathic strategies, leading to poor interpretability and susceptibility to distribution shifts in offline learning. To address these limitations, we propose a novel framework \textbf{Causal-ESC}. Departing from conventional paradigms that directly utilize raw dialogue history as input, our approach introduces Doubly Robust (DR) learning to explicitly model the causal effect of utterance features on strategy selection, effectively mitigating the biases and counterfactual unobservability inherent in offline datasets. We further integrate an LLM-based stylized rewriting mechanism to translate these rigorously learned causal strategies into natural, context-consistent responses. Comprehensive experiments, supported by statistical verification (e.g., Outcome $R^2$) and human-like evaluation, demonstrate that our framework not only significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in empathy and helpfulness but also provides a theoretically grounded, interpretable solution to the mechanistic interpretability dilemma in affective computing.

ACL 2026

Causal-ESC: Reliable Policy Learning for Emotional Support Conversation via Causal Inference

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. <br>
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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.

technical paper

Games offer a compelling paradigm for developing general reasoning capabilities in language models, as they naturally demand strategic planning, probabilistic inference, and adaptive decision-making. However, existing self-play approaches rely solely on terminal game outcomes, providing no mechanism to distinguish transferable reasoning patterns from game-specific heuristics. We present STRATAGEM, which addresses two fundamental barriers to reasoning transfer: domain specificity, where learned patterns remain anchored in game semantics, and contextual stasis, where static game contexts fail to cultivate progressive reasoning. STRATAGEM selectively reinforces trajectories exhibiting abstract, domain-agnostic reasoning through a Reasoning Transferability Coefficient, while incentivizing adaptive reasoning development via a Reasoning Evolution Reward. Experiments across mathematical reasoning, general reasoning, and code generation benchmarks demonstrate substantial improvements, with particularly strong gains on competition-level mathematics where multi-step reasoning is critical. Ablation studies and human evaluation confirm that both components contribute to transferable reasoning.

Stratagem: Learning Transferable Reasoning via Trajectory-Modulated Game Self-Play

Effective memory management is essential for large language model agents to navigate long-horizon tasks. Recent research has explored using Reinforcement Learning to develop specialized memory manager agents. However, existing approaches rely on final task performance as the primary reward, which results in severe reward sparsity and ineffective credit assignment, providing insufficient guidance for individual memory operations. To this end, we propose Fine-Mem, a unified framework designed for fine-grained feedback alignment. First, we introduce a Chunk-level Step Reward to provide immediate step-level supervision via auxiliary chunk-specific question answering tasks. Second, we devise Evidence-Anchored Reward Attribution to redistribute global rewards by anchoring credit to key memory operations, based on the specific memory items utilized as evidence in reasoning. Together, these components enable stable policy optimization and align local memory operations with the long-term utility of memory. Experiments on Memalpha and MemoryAgentBench demonstrate that Fine-Mem consistently outperforms strong baselines, achieving superior success rates across various sub-tasks. Further analysis reveals its adaptability and strong generalization capabilities across diverse model configurations and backbones

Fine-Mem: Fine-Grained Feedback Alignment for Long-Horizon Memory Management

Long-context summarization is pivotal for extracting core insights from extensive documents. While Large Language Models (LLMs) show remarkable capabilities, they frequently encounter attention dilution and hallucination with lengthy inputs. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) partially mitigates this, but conventional RAG relies on shallow similarity retrieval of fragmented chunks, failing to capture high-level thematic structures and long-range dependencies. Although graph-based RAG approaches have emerged to address these structural limitations, existing solutions, such as Graph of Records (GoR), critically suffer from a fundamental flaw: they paradoxically re-introduce hallucinations by constructing graphs based on unreliable, LLM-generated responses. To overcome these challenges, we introduce Hierarchical Graph of Evidence} (HiGoE) (Code link https://github.com/tkw123/HiGOE). HiGoE redefines the retrieval process by replacing unreliable chunk-based methods with a filtered proposition–evidence graph, ensuring verifiable fact grounding and substantially reducing hallucination. Moreover, HiGoE leverages Personalized PageRank (PPR) to cluster related nodes into thematic hierarchies, thereby restoring global document structure and effectively mitigating attention dilution. To model complex, multi-level relations beyond mere shallow similarity, we develop an Enhanced Graph Attention Network. Experiments show HiGoE consistently surpasses baselines in quality and efficiency.

HiGoE: Hierarchical Graph of Evidence to Enhance Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Long-context Summarization

Reward models (RMs) are central to reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), providing the critical supervision signals that align large language models (LLMs) with human preferences.
Generative reward models (GRMs) provide greater interpretability than traditional scalar RMs, but they come with a critical trade-off: pairwise methods are hindered by a training-inference mismatch, while pointwise methods require expensive absolute annotations.
To bridge this gap, we propose the Preference-aware Task-adaptive Reward Model (PaTaRM).
Unlike prior approaches, PaTaRM enables robust pointwise training using readily available pairwise data via a novel Preference-Aware Reward (PAR) mechanism, eliminating the need for explicit rating labels. Furthermore, it incorporates a task-adaptive rubric system that dynamically generates instance-specific criteria for precise evaluation.
Extensive experiments demonstrate that PaTaRM achieves an average relative improvement of 8.7% over the corresponding base models on RewardBench and RMBench across the Qwen3-8B and Qwen3-14B backbones.
Crucially, when used as a reward model for downstream RLHF, it yields an average relative improvement of 13.6% over the corresponding base policies on IFEval and InfoBench, validating its effectiveness for policy alignment.
Our code, data, and checkpoints are available at https://huggingface.co/AIJian/PaTaRM

PaTaRM: Bridging Pairwise and Pointwise Signals via Preference-Aware Task-Adaptive Reward Modeling

Test-time scaling has enabled Large Language Models (LLMs) to tackle complex reasoning, yet the limitations of current Chain-of-Thought (CoT) evaluation obscure whether performance gains stem from genuine reasoning or mere verbosity. To address this, (1) we propose a novel neuro-symbolic framework for the non-intrusive, comprehensive process-centric evaluation of reasoning grounded in First-Order Logic. (2) Through this lens, we identify four distinct behavioral prototypes and diagnose the failure modes. (3) We examine the impact of inference mode, training strategy, and model scale. Our analysis reveals that extended token generation is not a prerequisite for deep reasoning. Furthermore, we reveal critical constraints: mixing long and short CoT data in training risks premature saturation and collapse, while distillation into smaller models captures behavioral length but fails to replicate logical efficacy due to intrinsic capacity limits.

ReEfBench: Quantifying the Reasoning Efficiency of LLMs

Reasoning segmentation requires models to ground complex, implicit textual queries into precise pixel-level masks. Existing approaches rely on a single segmentation token $\texttt{\<SEG\>}$, whose hidden state implicitly encodes both semantic reasoning and spatial localization, limiting the model's ability to explicitly disentangle *what to segment* from *where to segment*. We introduce AnchorSeg, which reformulates reasoning segmentation as a structured conditional generation process over image tokens, conditioned on language grounded query banks. Instead of compressing all semantic reasoning and spatial localization into a single embedding, AnchorSeg constructs an ordered sequence of query banks: latent reasoning tokens that capture intermediate semantic states, and a segmentation anchor token that provides explicit spatial grounding. We model spatial conditioning as a factorized distribution over image tokens, where the anchor query determines localization signals while contextual queries provide semantic modulation. To bridge token-level predictions and pixel-level supervision, we propose Token--Mask Cycle Consistency (TMCC), a bidirectional training objective that enforces alignment across resolutions. By explicitly decoupling spatial grounding from semantic reasoning through structured language grounded query banks, AnchorSeg achieves state-of-the-art results on ReasonSeg test set (67.7\% gIoU and 68.1\% cIoU). All code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/rui-qian/AnchorSeg.

AnchorSeg: Language Grounded Query Banks for Reasoning Segmentation

The evolution from static ranking models to Agentic Recommender Systems (Agentic RecSys) empowers AI agents to maintain long-term user profiles and autonomously plan service tasks. While this paradigm shift enhances personalization, it introduces a vulnerability: reliance on Long-term Memory (LTM). In this paper, we uncover a threat termed “Visual Inception.” Unlike traditional adversarial attacks that seek immediate misclassification, Visual Inception injects triggers into user-uploaded images (e.g., lifestyle photos) that act as “sleeper agents” within the system’s memory. When retrieved during future planning, these poisoned memories hijack the agent’s reasoning chain, steering it toward adversary-defined goals (e.g., promoting high-margin products) without prompt injection. To mitigate this, we propose CognitiveGuard, a dual-process defense framework inspired by human cognition. It consists of a System 1 Perceptual Sanitizer (diffusion-based purification) to cleanse sensory inputs and a System 2 Reasoning Verifier (counterfactual consistency checks) to detect anomalies in memory-driven planning. Extensive experiments on a mock e-commerce agent environment demonstrate that Visual Inception achieves about 85% Goal-Hit Rate (GHR), while CognitiveGuard reduces this risk to around 10% with configurable latency trade-offs (about 1.5s in lite mode to about 6.5s for full sequential verification), without quality degradation under our setup.Latency reporting uses separate accounting: query-time overhead excludes one-time upload-time preprocessing.

Visual Inception: Compromising Long-term Planning in Agentic Recommenders via Multimodal Memory Poisoning

Temporal Knowledge Graph (TKG) reasoning remains challenging to characterize with conventional flat representations due to its intrinsic heterogeneous structure. Existing multi-geometry approaches face two key bottlenecks: 1) the Riemannian depth barrier driven by numerical instability, which restricts models to shallow architectures; and 2) gate collapse, where adaptive fusion mechanisms suffer from gradient starvation and degenerate into single-geometry solutions. To this end, we propose MAGIC (Multi-geometry Annealing Graph Interaction with Consensus). Our framework introduces a Tangent-Residual Engine in multi-geometric spaces, which enables the first stable 8-layer geometric evolution and reveals a phenomenon termed Geometric Annealing, where manifold curvature spontaneously evolves from semantic flatness in shallow layers to structural complexity in deeper layers. We further design an explicit reasoning module with structural consensus, leveraging geometric invariants and structural priors to regulate gradient flow, prevent collapse, and ensure robust synergy across Hyperbolic, Spherical, and Euclidean spaces. Experiments show that MAGIC achieves state-of-the-art performance in TKG reasoning, improving MRR by up to 2.9 points.

MAGIC: Deep Geometric Evolution with Structural Consensus for Temporal Knowledge Graph Reasoning

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has become a standard paradigm for grounding Large Language Models (LLMs) with external knowledge. However, RAG performance often degrades substantially when faced with noisy, outdated, or conflicting retrieved information. In this work, we empirically demonstrate that Prior-Guided Reasoning—a strategy that explicitly elicits the model's parametric knowledge as prior information to guide reasoning on retrieved documents—effectively mitigates the impact of external conflicts. Building on this, we propose BrPr (Bernoulli-gated reinforcement learning for Prior-Guided reasoning), a framework that achieves robust performance across varying degrees of external inconsistency. Furthermore, by employing a Bernoulli-gated dropout mechanism during training, BrPr distills the prior-driven reasoning capability into the model parameters, enabling efficient latent reasoning without explicit prior generation. The experimental results demonstrate that BrPr consistently exhibits superior robustness to external conflicts and noise.

Efficient Prior-Guided Reasoning for Robust Retrieval-Augmented Generation under Conflicts

Contemporary progress in Large Language Models (LLMs) has revealed notable inferential capacities via reinforcement learning (RL) employing verifiable rewards. However, ``zero-RL'' approaches relying on fixed prompt templates introduce substantial sampling inefficiencies for weak LLMs, as most problems generate invalid outputs during accuracy-driven filtration. To solve this, we propose Cog-Rethinker, a novel hierarchical metacognitive RL framework. Cog-Rethinker enhances the rollout procedure by improving sample utilization through a two-stage framework leveraging human cognition. First, it prompts the policy to decompose zero-accuracy problems into subproblems. Second, it prompts the policy to refine answers by referencing previous wrong solutions. Moreover, to enable cold-starts and maintain train-test consistency, Cog-Rethinker applies supervised fine-tuning using correct samples from these stages. Experimental results demonstrate Cog-Rethinker's superior performance on mathematical reasoning benchmarks and its improved sample efficiency that accelerates convergence compared to baselines.

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Stratagem: Learning Transferable Reasoning via Trajectory-Modulated Game Self-Play

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