United States

The convergence of LLM-powered research assistants and AI-based peer review systems creates a critical vulnerability: fully automated publication loops where AI-generated research is evaluated by AI reviewers without human oversight. We investigate this through BadScientist, a framework that evaluates whether fabrication-oriented paper generation agents can deceive multi-model LLM review systems. Our generator employs presentation-manipulation strategies requiring no real experiments. We develop a rigorous evaluation framework with formal error guarantees (concentration bounds and calibration analysis), calibrated on real data. Our results reveal systematic vulnerabilities: fabricated papers achieve acceptance rates up to 18%. Critically, we identify concern-acceptance conflict---reviewers frequently flag integrity issues yet assign acceptance-level scores. Our mitigation strategies show only marginal improvements, with detection accuracy barely exceeding random chance. Despite provably sound aggregation mathematics, integrity checking systematically fails, exposing fundamental limitations in current AI-driven review systems and underscoring the urgent need for defense-in-depth safeguards in scientific publishing.

ACL 2026

 BadScientist: Can a Research Agent Write Convincing but Unsound Papers that Fool LLM Reviewers?

## Welcome!
"I am excited to welcome you to this year’s edition of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing! Importantly, it marks the 30th edition of EMNLP. With over 8,000 submissions, more than 3,000 accepted papers, and thousands of attendees, we have come a long way from that first
workshop, which had 14 accepted papers. As the field looks ahead, Suzhou is the fitting location for celebrating this milestone: rooted in a long literary tradition, yet modern and forward-looking, and home to a large share of the NLP community." 

*Message from the General Chair, Dirk Hovy*

EMNLP 2025

Celebrate 30 Years of EMNLP! 
EMNLP 2025 will be held in Suzhou, China from November 5th to November 9th, 2025.

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. 
[Full Message from General Chair Philipp Koehn](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QiJFOmMjvDgsDo3i1XzlQnImxe3RU_Cy/view?usp=sharing) 
<html><button style="display: inline-flex; align-items: center; justify-content: center; white-space: nowrap; border-radius: 9999px; font-weight: bold; background: #7c3aed; color: white; font-family: 'Space Grotesk', sans-serif; height: 40px; font-size: 16px; padding: 0 20px; border: none; cursor: pointer" onclick="window.open('https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QiJFOmMjvDgsDo3i1XzlQnImxe3RU_Cy/view?usp=sharing')">Conference Handbook</button></html>

To access this event page, you need to log in with the **email address you registered with**. Access credentials will be sent to your email from Underline - subject line "Welcome to ACL 2026". Please be sure to check your spam email folder if you do not see an email confirmation right away.

To access this event page, you are required to register.
Please complete your registration to continue.

We recommend reading [**the registration information**](https://2026.aclweb.org/registration/) first.

Registration Required

The 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026) will take place in San Diego, California, from July 2 - 7, 2026.

While Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at algorithmic code generation, they struggle with front-end development, where correctness is judged on rendered pixels and interaction. We present ReLook, an agentic, vision-grounded reinforcement learning framework that empowers an agent to close a robust generate--diagnose--refine loop by invoking a multimodal LLM (MLLM) as a tool. During training, the agent employs an MLLM-in-the-loop to serve as a visual critic, evaluating code via screenshots and providing actionable feedback. Crucially, we enforce a strict zero-reward policy for invalid renders to guarantee renderability and mitigate reward hacking. To prevent behavioral collapse, we introduce Forced Optimization, a strict acceptance rule that admits only improving revisions, yielding monotonically better trajectories. At inference, we decouple the critic and run a lightweight, critic-free self-edit cycle, keeping latency comparable to base decoding while retaining most of the gains. Across three widely used benchmarks, ReLook consistently outperforms strong baselines in vision-grounded front-end code generation, highlighting the benefits of agentic perception, visual rewards, and training–inference decoupling.

ReLook: Vision-Grounded RL with a Multimodal LLM Critic for Agentic Web Coding

Unlearning in large language models (LLMs) has emerged as a promising safeguard against adversarial behaviors. When the forgetting loss is applied uniformly without considering token-level semantic importance, model utility can be unnecessarily degraded. Recent studies have explored token-wise loss regularizers that prioritize informative tokens, but largely rely on ground-truth confidence or external linguistic parsers, which limits their ability to capture contextual information or the model’s overall predictive state. Intuitively, function words like “the” primarily serve syntactic roles and are highly predictable with little ambiguity, but informative words admit multiple plausible alternatives with greater uncertainty. Based on this intuition, we propose Entropy-guided Token Weighting (ETW), a token-level unlearning regularizer that uses entropy of the predictive distribution as a proxy for token informativeness. We demonstrate that informative tokens tend to have higher entropy, whereas structural tokens tend to have lower entropy. This behavior enables ETW to achieve more effective unlearning while better preserving model utility than existing token-level approaches.

 Forget What Matters, Keep the Rest: Selective Unlearning of Informative Tokens

The evaluation of Large Language Models (LLMs) for software engineering has shifted towards complex, repository-level tasks. However, existing benchmarks predominantly rely on coarse-grained pass rates that treat programming proficiency as a monolithic capability, obscuring specific cognitive bottlenecks. Furthermore, the static nature of these benchmarks renders them vulnerable to data contamination and performance saturation. To address these limitations, we introduce CoreCodeBench, a configurable repository-level benchmark designed to dissect coding capabilities through atomized tasks. Leveraging our automated framework, CorePipe, we extract and transform Python repositories into a comprehensive suite of tasks that isolate distinct cognitive demands within identical code contexts. Unlike static evaluations, CoreCodeBench supports controllable difficulty scaling to prevent saturation and ensures superior data quality. It achieves a 78.55% validity yield, significantly surpassing the 31.7% retention rate of SWE-bench-Verified. Extensive experiments with state-of-the-art LLMs reveal a significant capability misalignment, evidenced by distinct ranking shifts across cognitive dimensions. This indicates that coding proficiency is non-monolithic, as strength in one aspect does not necessarily translate to others. These findings underscore the necessity of our fine-grained taxonomy in diagnosing model deficiencies and offer a sustainable, rigorous framework for evolving code intelligence. Code of CorePipe framework and data of CoreCodeBench are available in https://github.com/AGI-Eval-Official/CoreCodeBench and https://huggingface.co/collections/tubehhh/corecodebench.

CoreCodeBench: Decoupling Code Intelligence via Fine-Grained Repository-Level Tasks

High-quality chain-of-thought has demonstrated strong potential for unlocking the reasoning capabilities of large language models. However, current paradigms typically treat the reasoning process as an indivisible sequence, lacking an intrinsic mechanism to quantify step-wise information gain. This granularity gap manifests in two limitations: inference inefficiency from redundant exploration without explicit guidance, and optimization difficulty due to sparse outcome supervision or costly external verifiers. In this work, we propose \textbf{CoT-Flow}, a framework that reconceptualizes discrete reasoning steps as a continuous probabilistic flow, quantifying the contribution of each step toward the ground-truth answer. Built on this formulation, CoT-Flow enables two complementary methodologies: flow-guided decoding, which employs a greedy flow-based decoding strategy to extract information-efficient reasoning paths, and flow-based reinforcement learning, which constructs a verifier-free dense reward function. Experiments on challenging benchmarks demonstrate that CoT-Flow achieves a superior balance between inference efficiency and reasoning performance.

 Efficient Paths and Dense Rewards: Probabilistic Flow Reasoning for Large Language Models

Medical diagnostics is a high-stakes and complex domain that is critical to patient care. However, current evaluations of large language models (LLMs) remain limited in capturing key challenges of clinical diagnostic scenarios. Most rely on benchmarks derived from public exams, raising contamination bias that can inflate performance, and they overlook the confounded nature of real consultations beyond textbook cases. Recent dynamic evaluations offer a promising alternative, but often remain insufficient for diagnosis-oriented benchmarking, with limited coverage of clinically grounded confounders and trustworthiness beyond accuracy. To address these gaps, we propose DyReMe, a dynamic benchmark for medical diagnostics that provides a controlled and scalable stress test of diagnostic robustness. Unlike static exam-style questions, DyReMe generates fresh, consultation-style cases that incorporate clinically grounded confounders, such as differential diagnoses and common misdiagnosis factors. It also varies expression styles to capture heterogeneous patient-style descriptions. Beyond accuracy, DyReMe evaluates LLMs on three additional clinically relevant dimensions: veracity, helpfulness, and consistency. Our experiments show that this dynamic approach yields more challenging assessments and exposes substantial weaknesses of stateof-the-art LLMs under clinically confounded diagnostic settings. These findings highlight the urgent need for evaluation frameworks that better assess trustworthy medical diagnostics under clinically grounded confounders.

Inflated Excellence or True Performance? Rethinking Medical Diagnostic Benchmarks with Dynamic Evaluation

While natural language is the de facto communication medium for LLM-based agents, it presents a fundamental constraint. The process of downsampling rich, internal latent states into discrete tokens inherently limits the depth and nuance of information that can be transmitted, thereby hindering collaborative problem-solving. Inspired by telepathy, which bypasses symbolic language in communication, we propose Interlat (Inter-agent Latent Space Communication), a paradigm that leverages the continuous last hidden states of an LLM as a representation of its thought for direct communication (termed "latent communication"). An additional learned compression process further compresses latent communication via latent space reasoning. Experiments demonstrate that Interlat outperforms both fine-tuned chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting and single-agent baselines, even across heterogeneous models, promoting more exploratory behavior and enabling genuine utilization of latent information. Further compression not only substantially accelerates inference by up to 24× but also maintains competitive performance through an efficient information-preserving mechanism. We position this work as a feasibility study of entirely latent space inter-agent communication, and our results highlight its potential, offering valuable insights for future research.

Enabling Agents to Communicate Entirely in Latent Space

Large language models (LLMs) with long context windows offer the potential to translate entire documents in a single pass, yet they frequently suffer from catastrophic information distortion, undermining the strict faithfulness required for translation. This challenge is compounded by the scarcity of document-level parallel data, which makes both supervised fine-tuning and reliable evaluation prohibitively expensive. We propose LongDu, a self-supervised post-training framework that improves long-document translation reliability via round-trip consistency. Given monolingual documents, LongDu samples multiple candidate translations, back-translates each candidate, and optimizes the model to prefer translations that best reconstruct the source. To make this signal robust for long-form generation, we design a reward that filters trivial failure modes (e.g., copying and local language drift) before applying a reconstruction and fluency score, enabling stable reinforcement learning without human annotations. We additionally introduce Long-CIRT, an automatic evaluation protocol that quantifies information distortion by measuring how much a LLM’s performance degrades after a translation cycle. Across multiple base models, LongDu substantially improves information retention and translation quality, with gains that generalize beyond the training length range and to unseen target languages.

Improving Long-Context Translation via Self-Supervised Dual Learning

While Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve high accuracy on established Classical Chinese Poetry benchmarks, it remains challenging to distinguish transferable Linguistic-Aesthetic Reasoning from reliance on familiar pre-training patterns. To address this issue, we introduce Neo-Classic, an evaluation benchmark that combines a constructionist Out-of-Sample (OOS) dataset with a suite of reverse understanding probes. Unlike traditional benchmarks that rely on verification or generation over historical corpora, Neo-Classic comprises strictly metrical poetry authored by contemporary experts, reducing the possibility of direct retrieval. We evaluate state-of-the-art models, including Qwen3-Max, Gemini-3-Pro, and DeepSeek-V3.2, across five behavioral probes designed to test hierarchical constraint satisfaction. Our results reveal two primary limitations. First, a performance gap of 20%–50% emerges when models transition from historical to contemporary texts. Second, models exhibit substantial difficulties in discourse-level ordering tasks, with standard accuracy remaining low (0–13%). Although expert-level guidance improves the performance of reasoning-enhanced models to 36%, a notable gap with human experts persists. These findings suggest that while current LLMs capture local formal patterns, they struggle with global hierarchical planning required for robust Linguistic-Aesthetic Reasoning.

Neo-Classic: A Benchmark for Evaluating Linguistic-Aesthetic Reasoning in Classical Chinese Poetry

Maintaining consistency in long-term dialogues remains a fundamental challenge for LLMs, as standard retrieval mechanisms often fail to capture the temporal evolution of historical states. While memory-augmented frameworks offer a structured alternative, current systems rely on static prompting of closed-source models or suffer from ineffective training paradigms with sparse rewards. We introduce MemBuilder, a reinforcement learning framework that trains models to orchestrate multi-dimensional memory construction with attributed dense rewards. MemBuilder addresses two key challenges: (1) Sparse Trajectory-Level Rewards: we employ synthetic session-level question generation to provide dense intermediate rewards across extended trajectories; and (2) Multi-Dimensional Memory Attribution: we introduce contribution-aware gradient weighting that scales policy updates based on each component's downstream impact. Experimental results show that MemBuilder enables a 4B-parameter model to outperform state-of-the-art closed-source baselines, exhibiting strong generalization across long-term dialogue benchmarks.

MemBuilder: Reinforcing LLMs for Long-Term Memory Construction via Attributed Dense Rewards

Large language models (LLMs) achieve strong performance on metaphor detection and interpretation tasks, yet it remains unclear what such behavioral success actually reveals about metaphor processing. We present a diagnostic analysis that examines the limits of behavioral evidence by probing three complementary dimensions: semantic attribute alignment, lexical invariance, and syntactic sensitivity. Using geometric probing, we assess whether model-generated interpretations align with reference semantic attributes; through context-varying substitution, we analyze the stability of lexical associations between metaphorical and literal expressions; and via controlled syntactic perturbations, we examine sensitivity in metaphor detection. Our analysis reveals that LLM-generated interpretations can exhibit semantic drift relative to reference attributes; stable lexical anchors persist across contextual conditions, potentially supporting conventional metaphors while biasing novel metaphors requiring contextual integration; and detection performance is sensitive to syntactic irregularities. These findings suggest that strong behavioral performance may reflect heterogeneous underlying signals, highlighting the need for caution when interpreting metaphor benchmarks as evidence of robust, integrated semantic understanding.

Downloads

Next from ACL 2026

ReLook: Vision-Grounded RL with a Multimodal LLM Critic for Agentic Web Coding

Similar lecture

Generative Reviewer Agents: Scalable Simulacra of Peer Review