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Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) enables hardware-agnostic LLM compression via low-rank approximation, yet optimal rank allocation remains a bottleneck. Existing methods predominantly derive layer importance from performance-oriented proxies. Yet, these metrics fail to distinguish between representational importance and structural compressibility, consequently obscuring the fine-grained influence of spectral distribution shape. We demonstrate this disconnect through spectral analysis, revealing that layers with similar information capacity can exhibit markedly different singular value decay behaviors, corresponding to varying degrees of redundancy in the spectral tail. This imperfect coupling implies that allocation strategies driven solely by importance leave significant compression opportunities underexploited. To address this gap, we propose HiSVD, a hierarchical rank allocation framework with two stages: (1) Capacity-Anchored Baseline Allocation, which preserves representational stability by aligning rank budgets with information capacity; and (2) Redundancy-Aware Refinement, which modulates this baseline using tail redundancy to penalize structural excess. Experiments on LLMs demonstrate that HiSVD achieves superior compression efficiency, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art baselines by effectively exploiting this spectral heterogeneity.

ACL 2026

HiSVD: Principled Low-Rank Approximation of LLMs via Hierarchical Modeling of Information Capacity and Spectral Structure

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.

technical paper

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.

Large language models (LLMs) store extensive factual knowledge acquired during pretraining, yet this knowledge is inherently static and may become inaccurate or outdated, leading to knowledge hallucinations. Knowledge editing offers an efficient alternative to full retraining by enabling targeted factual updates while preserving overall model behavior. Existing locate-then-edit methods, however, rely on fixed layer selection strategies, treating the locating stage as a static design choice and failing to account for the hierarchical and instance-dependent nature of knowledge representation in LLMs. In this paper, we propose FiDAL, a Fisher-driven adaptation-aware locating strategy that dynamically identifies which model components should be edited for a given knowledge update. FiDAL formulates localization as a weight-level decision problem and leverages Fisher Information to select layers that are both influential and sensitive to factual modifications. A lightweight probing stage with low-rank modulation enables efficient localization with minimal overhead. Experiments on standard benchmarks demonstrate that FiDAL consistently improves editing effectiveness and knowledge preservation across multiple editing methods.

Fisher-Driven Adaptive Locating for Knowledge Editing in Large Language Models

Despite their rapid advancement, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) remain vulnerable to diverse safety risks. Current benchmarks fail to provide reliable assessments due to limited risk coverage, insufficient scale, and the oversight of complex modality combinations (e.g., cross-modal risks). To address this, we introduce the Unified Safety Benchmark (USB), a comprehensive framework covering 61 risk categories across four distinct modality interactions. We first demonstrate that existing benchmarks—even when aggregated—leave significant coverage gaps. To bridge this, we design a sophisticated data synthesis pipeline that generates complementary data, ensuring balanced coverage across all risk dimensions. Furthermore, beyond evaluating vulnerability to harmful queries, USB incorporates the simultaneous assessment of model over-refusal on benign inputs as an integrated diagnostic suite. Experimental results, evaluating 22 MLLMs across 244 risk-modality intersections, demonstrate that existing MLLMs still struggle with the trade-off between avoiding vulnerabilities and over-refusal. Models are particularly vulnerable to image-only or cross-modal risky inputs, highlighting the persistent need for refined safety mechanisms. Warning: This paper contains unfiltered and potentially harmful content that may be offensive.

USB: A COMPREHENSIVE AND UNIFIED SAFETY EVALUATION BENCHMARK FOR MULTIMODAL LARGE LANGUAGE MODELS

Large language model (LLM) agents face fundamental limitations in long-horizon reasoning due to finite context windows, making effective memory management critical. Existing methods typically handle long-term memory (LTM) and short-term memory (STM) as separate components, relying on heuristics or auxiliary controllers, which limits adaptability and end-to-end optimization. In this paper, we propose Agentic Memory (AgeMem), a unified framework that integrates LTM and STM management directly into the agent’s policy. AgeMem exposes memory operations as tool-based actions, enabling the LLM agent to autonomously decide what and when to store, retrieve, update, summarize, or discard information. To train such unified behaviors, we propose a three-stage progressive reinforcement learning strategy and design a step-wise GRPO to address sparse and discontinuous rewards induced by memory operations. Experiments on five long-horizon benchmarks demonstrate that AgeMem consistently outperforms strong memory-augmented baselines across multiple LLM backbones, achieving improved task performance, higher-quality long-term memory, and more efficient context usage.

Agentic Memory: Learning Unified Long-Term and Short-Term Memory Management for Large Language Model Agents

As large language models continue to advance, their application in educational contexts remains underexplored and under-optimized. In this paper, we address this gap by introducing the first diverse benchmark tailored for educational scenarios, incorporating synthetic data containing 9 major scenarios and over 4,000 distinct educational contexts. To enable comprehensive assessment, we propose a set of multi-dimensional evaluation metrics that cover 12 critical aspects relevant to both teachers and students. We further apply human annotation to ensure the effectiveness of the model-generated evaluation responses. Additionally, we succeed to train a relatively small-scale model on our constructed dataset and demonstrate that it can achieve performance comparable to state-of-the-art large models (e.g., Deepseek V3, Qwen Max) on the test set. Overall, this work provides a practical foundation for the development and evaluation of education-oriented language models.

EduBench: A Comprehensive Benchmarking Dataset for Evaluating Large Language Models in Diverse Educational Scenarios

Automated theorem proving in Euclidean geometry, particularly for International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) level problems, remains a major challenge and an important research focus in Artificial Intelligence. In this paper, we present a highly efficient method for geometry theorem proving that runs entirely on CPUs without relying on neural network–based inference. Our initial study shows that a simple random strategy for adding auxiliary points can achieve ''silver-medal'' level human performance on IMO. Building on this, we propose HAGeo, a Heuristic-based method for adding Auxiliary points in Geometric deduction that solves 28 of 30 problems on the IMO-30 benchmark, achieving ``gold-medal'' level performance and surpassing AlphaGeometry, a competitive neural network–based approach, by a notable margin. To evaluate our method and existing approaches more comprehensively, we further construct HAGeo, a benchmark consisting of 409 geometry problems with human-assessed difficulty levels. Compared with the widely used IMO-30, our benchmark poses greater challenges and provides a more precise evaluation, setting a higher bar for geometry theorem proving.

Gold-Medal-Level Olympiad Geometry Solving with Efficient Heuristic Auxiliary Constructions

While diffusion and flow-matching models have advanced TTS, generating high-arousal emotions remains a persistent challenge due to the trade-off between stability and expressiveness. Existing systems often suffer from linguistic collapse when pursuing high intensity or fail to meet target emotional levels under stable settings. In this work, we identify that standard Gaussian initialization inevitably introduces a neutral prosody bias, while uniform Classifier-Free Guidance often distorts the acoustic manifold, leading to artifacts. To address this, we propose an inference framework that rectifies the emotional trajectory. An Emotion-Rectified Noise Prior injects a semantic gradient at initialization to align sampling with the target emotional manifold, and Likelihood-Inverse Guidance adaptively schedules guidance via a conditional/unconditional likelihood ratio, strengthening guidance only when the trajectory drifts toward a neutral fallback. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method effectively resolves the stability bottleneck in high-intensity scenarios, achieving superior linguistic accuracy and emotional fidelity without model retraining. Audio samples are available at https://showtts.github.io/emotionTTS/.

Rectifying the Emotional Flow: Aligning Priors and Dynamic Guidance for High-Arousal Text-to-Speech

As autonomous web agents are increasingly deployed to perform real-world tasks, ensuring their safety has become a critical concern. In this work, we study web agent behavior under realistic deceptive interfaces in the e-commerce domain. We introduce WebDecept, a lightweight and configurable plugin framework that enables controlled injection of deceptive interface patterns into existing web environments. Using WebDecept, we instantiate seven deceptive patterns commonly observed on the open web, including targeted advertisements, domain redirection, and shopping manipulation. By injecting these patterns into the frontend during task execution, we perform controlled evaluation of multiple multimodal web agents. Our results show that current web agents are highly susceptible to multiple classes of deceptive interfaces, and that prompt-based constraints are often insufficient to mitigate these failures. We further analyze how the design choices of deceptive patterns influence the success of such manipulations. These findings highlight safety challenges that should be addressed as web agents are scaled toward real-world deployment.

Benchmarking Web Agent Safety under E-commerce Deceptive Interfaces

Group-Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has emerged as an efficient paradigm for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs), yet its efficacy is primarily confined to domains with verifiable ground truths. Extending GRPO to **open-domain settings** remains a critical challenge, as **unconstrained generation** entails multi-faceted and often conflicting objectives—such as creativity versus factuality—where rigid, static reward scalarization is inherently suboptimal. To address this, we propose **MAESTRO** (**M**eta-learning **A**daptive **E**stimation of **S**calarization **T**rade-offs for **R**eward **O**ptimization), which introduces a meta-cognitive orchestration layer that treats reward scalarization as a dynamic latent policy, leveraging the model's terminal hidden states as a semantic bottleneck to perceive task-specific priorities. We formulate this as a contextual bandit problem within a bi-level optimization framework, where a lightweight Conductor network co-evolves with the policy by utilizing group-relative advantages as a meta-reward signal. Across seven benchmarks, MAESTRO consistently outperforms single-reward and static multi-objective baselines, while preserving the efficiency advantages of GRPO, and in some settings even reducing redundant generation.

MAESTRO: Meta-learning Adaptive Estimation of Scalarization Trade-offs for Reward Optimization

As large language models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable capabilities across a wide range of tasks, ensuring the safety of their outputs is increasingly critical. To mitigate the risk of policy-violating responses, numerous guardrail models have been developed for harmful-content detection. While effective on short outputs, existing guardrails degrade on long-form responses, reflecting limited semantic understanding and weak robustness to contextual noise. To address these limitations, we propose RST-Guarder, an inference-time method that improves harmful-content detection for long-form inputs without additional data curation or model training. RST-Guarder first applies a RST parser to long-form inputs to get discourse-level semantic relations among segments, and subsequently performs hierarchical probabilistic inference to aggregate segment-level safety scores produced by pre-trained guardrail models. We evaluate RST-Guarder across multiple benchmarks and a diverse set of widely used guardrail models. Experimental results demonstrate that RST-Guarder consistently improves harmful-content detection on long-form inputs, while significantly reducing false positives that incorrectly classify benign content as harmful.

RST-Guarder: Enhancing Long-Context Robustness for Safeguards via RST Parsing and Probabilistic Inference

Various studies have pointed out that the performance of language models is poor in non-English or non-European languages. One of the factors affecting this performance is the effectiveness and suitability of the tokenization scheme used in the model. Indic scripts require multiple Unicode codepoints to represent a single visual unit to be encoded in the standard UTF-8 scheme. This paper investigates the effect of multiple tokenizers that use UTF-8 text input on the downstream performance of pretrained language models for Hindi and Marathi, languages written in $\textit{Devanāgari}$ script. We present the intrinsic performance of the tokenizers using Fertility, Rényi Efficiency and Percentile Frequency, and report the extrinsic performance of monolingual and multilingual models on question-answering tasks, using an automated parts-of-speech and sentence similarity based evaluation framework, and on word-level tasks such as grapheme-to-phoneme conversion and transliteration. We propose a grapheme cluster tokenizer for the script which shows performance better than or competitive with other popular tokenizers. We also find that the Rényi Efficiency metric is highly correlated to downstream performance on question answering.

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