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Scaling LLM-based agents to long-horizon deep research is constrained by the context-noise trade-off, where linear history accumulation degrades reasoning and dilutes fine-grained evidence. To address this, we introduce the Cognitive Scaffold, a factorized memory architecture that decouples the cognitive state into a Fluid Working Context for immediate reasoning and a persistent Knowledge Graph for long-term retention. Unlike unstructured summarization, our framework employs a Rejection Sampling Fine-Tuning (RFT) pipeline to crystallize saturated context into structured event snapshots, strictly enforcing atomic constraints to preserve numerical values and entities. During reasoning, a thought-driven dual-path retrieval mechanism enables the agent to proactively recover precise evidence. Empirical evaluations on Xbench-DeepSearch, BrowseComp-ZH, and GAIA demonstrate that Cognitive Scaffold consistently outperforms baselines, achieving 74.7% Avg@3 and 87.0% Pass@3 on Xbench-DeepSearch, 48.5% Avg@3 and 65.9% Pass@3 on BrowseComp-ZH, and 72.8% Avg@3 and 88.3% Pass@3 on GAIA, while reducing compression hallucinations to 5.3%. We open-source our codebase to facilitate future research.

ACL 2026

Cognitive Scaffold: From Fluid Context to Crystallized Memory for Long-Horizon DeepResearch Agents

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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technical paper

$N$-ary knowledge graph completion (KGC) aims to infer missing components in facts with multiple entities under distinct semantic roles, commonly formulated as a knowledge hypergraph link prediction task. Most embedding-based approaches score individual hyperedges relying on enriched structural representations, but overlook intermediate propagation states containing complementary local and global structural evidence. Despite their capability to generate chain-of-thought (CoT) representations for the classical KGC task, large language models (LLMs) struggle with hypergraph structure involving multiple facts, while current hypergraph QA methods only provide LLMs with a single query signal rather than path-level evidence. These limitations hinder the transferability of existing methods, especially those leveraging LLMs, to solve the knowledge hypergraph link prediction problem. To bridge this gap, we propose HyperCoT, a structure-aware approach that models multi-hop structural reasoning as a depth-sensitive progressive evidence accumulation process. It constructs a Graphical Chain-of-Thought (Graph-CoT) by aggregating role-aware hyperedge states along strongly correlated reasoning paths, and injects the resulting path-level structural evidence into each token in query and candidate entities to prompt LLMs. Experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that HyperCoT consistently outperforms strong $n$-ary KGC baselines, particularly in high arity and structural sparsity scenarios, meanwhile yielding interpretable multi-hop reasoning traces.

Learning to Think on Hypergraph: HyperCoT for Structure-Guided N-ary Knowledge Graph Completion

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is a mainstream approach to mitigating hallucinations in Large Language Models (LLMs), yet in dynamic real-world scenarios, such as weather forecasting or evolving news events, existing retrievers suffer from both temporal-semantic misalignment and outdated-document interference. To address this, we propose Relevance & Recency Retrieval (Re$^3$), a novel framework that mitigates temporal hallucinations via two core components: a Time-Aware Dual Relevance Encoder that embeds heterogeneous temporal signals into the semantic space to ensure retrieval fidelity, and a Conflict-Aware Recency Filter that performs listwise arbitration to identify and suppress obsolete factual versions. To rigorously evaluate this setting, we introduce Re$^2$ Bench, a large-scale benchmark comprising over 1.3 million instances designed to assess system robustness in realistic environments where temporal constraints and conflicting factual versions coexist. Experiments on three public benchmarks and Re$^2$ Bench demonstrate that Re$^3$ consistently outperforms the strongest baselines by an average of 9.7% in generation accuracy, with gains of up to 25.2% on challenging dynamic tasks, while demonstrating robustness across diverse RAG settings.

Re$^3$: Relevance & Recency Retrieval for Mitigating Temporal Hallucination

Human cognition excels at extending knowledge through analogy, where word meanings evolve along structured pathways from concrete prototypes to abstract senses via metaphor and metonymy. Do Large Language Models (LLMs) internalize this generative logic, or merely mimic statistical patterns? To investigate this, we introduce CogEvolve, a cognitive linguistic benchmark designed to test these evolutionary pathways across textual and visual modalities. Our evaluation reveals a distinct cognitive profile: models function as "Super-Associators" expert at static recognition yet fail at causal reasoning. In text, they exhibit a Frequency-Primacy Conflation, confusing statistical prevalence with cognitive basicness. Crucially, this reasoning collapses further in the visual domain. We term this deficit the Ungrounded Arrow: models possess high-fidelity concept representations (the "dots") but lack the transformational operators (the "arrows") essential for true relational understanding.

CogEvolve: A Multimodal Benchmark for Evaluating Relational Reasoning in Semantic Extension

Urban transportation systems require precise modeling of dynamic spatiotemporal patterns across diverse tasks, such as traffic forecasting, electric vehicle (EV) charging demand prediction, and taxi dispatch. Existing approaches suffer from two key limitations: traditional deep learning models are task-specific and lack generalization capabilities, whereas Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle with structured spatiotemporal data and numerical reasoning. To bridge this gap, we propose TransLLM, a unified multi-task framework that synergizes spatiotemporal encoding with LLM reasoning through learnable prompt composition. To enable LLMs to perceive complex graph dependencies, we design a noise-augmented spatiotemporal encoder that projects structured signals into the LLM's embedding space. Furthermore, to overcome the rigidity of fixed prompt templates in heterogeneous traffic scenarios, we introduce an instance-level prompt routing mechanism trained via reinforcement learning. The framework operates by encoding spatiotemporal patterns into contextual representations, dynamically composing personalized prompts to guide LLM reasoning, and projecting the resulting representations through specialized output layers to generate task-specific predictions. Experiments on seven datasets and three tasks demonstrate that TransLLM outperforms many baselines, showing superior adaptability in both supervised and zero-shot settings with excellent generalization and robustness. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/lengjiaming/TransLLM.

TransLLM: A Unified Multi-Task Large Language Model for Urban Transportation via Learnable Prompting

With the widespread application of LLM-based agents across various domains, their complexity has introduced new security threats. Existing red-team methods mostly rely on modifying user prompts, which lack adaptability to new data and may impact the agent's performance. To address the challenge, this paper proposes the JailAgent framework, which completely avoids modifying the user prompt. Specifically, it implicitly manipulates the agent’s reasoning trajectory and memory retrieval with three key stages: Trigger Extraction, Reasoning Hijacking, and Constraint Tightening. Through precise trigger identification, real-time adaptive mechanisms, and an optimized objective function, JailAgent demonstrates outstanding performance in cross-model and cross-scenario environments.

Stop Fixating on Prompts: Reasoning Hijacking and Constraint Tightening for Red-Teaming LLM Agents

Existing fraud detection methods predominantly rely on transcribed text, suffering from ASR errors and missing crucial acoustic cues like vocal tone and environmental context. This limits their effectiveness against complex deceptive strategies. To address these challenges, we first propose **SAFE-QAQ**, an end-to-end comprehensive framework for audio-based slow-thinking fraud detection. First, the SAFE-QAQ framework eliminates the impact of transcription errors on detection performance. Secondly, we propose rule-based slow-thinking reward mechanisms that systematically guide the system to identify fraud-indicative patterns by accurately capturing fine-grained audio details, through hierarchical reasoning processes. Besides, our framework introduces a dynamic risk assessment framework during live calls, enabling early detection and prevention of fraud. Experiments on the TeleAntiFraud-Bench demonstrate that SAFE-QAQ achieves dramatic improvements over existing methods in multiple key dimensions, including accuracy, inference efficiency, and real-time processing capabilities. Currently deployed and analyzing over 70,000 calls daily, SAFE-QAQ effectively automates complex fraud detection, reducing human workload and financial losses. Code: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/SAFE-QAQ.

SAFE-QAQ: End-to-End Slow-Thinking Audio-Text Fraud Detection via Reinforcement Learning

Despite the recent success of large language models (LLMs) in time-series forecasting, most existing methods still adopt a Deep Synchronous Fusion strategy, where dense interactions between textual and temporal features are enforced at every layer of the network. This design overlooks the inherent granularity mismatch between modalities and leads to what we term semantic perceptual dissonance: high-level abstract semantics provided by the LLM become inappropriately entangled with the low-level, fine-grained numerical dynamics of time series, making it difficult for semantic priors to effectively guide forecasting. To address this issue, we propose TimeSAF, a new framework based on hierarchical asynchronous fusion. Unlike synchronous approaches, TimeSAF explicitly decouples unimodal feature learning from cross-modal interaction. It introduces an independent cross-modal semantic fusion trunk, which uses learnable queries to aggregate global semantics from the temporal and prompt backbones in a bottom-up manner, and a stage-wise semantic refinement decoder that asynchronously injects these high-level signals back into the temporal backbone. This mechanism provides stable and efficient semantic guidance while avoiding interference with low-level temporal dynamics. Extensive experiments on standard long-term forecasting benchmarks show that TimeSAF significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, and further exhibits strong generalization in both few-shot and zero-shot transfer settings.

TimeSAF: Towards LLM-Guided Semantic Asynchronous Fusion for Time Series Forecasting

Machine learning models are increasingly deployed in real-world applications, but even aligned models such as Mistral and LLaVA still exhibit unsafe behaviors inherited from pre-training. Current alignment methods like SFT and RLHF primarily encourage models to generate preferred responses, but do not explicitly remove the unsafe subnetworks that trigger harmful outputs. In this work, we introduce a resource-efficient pruning framework that directly identifies and removes parameters associated with unsafe behaviors while preserving model utility. Our method employs a gradient-free attribution mechanism, requiring only modest GPU resources, and generalizes across architectures and quantized variants. Empirical evaluations on ML models show substantial reductions in unsafe generations and improved robustness against jailbreak attacks, with minimal utility loss. From the perspective of the Lottery Ticket Hypothesis, our results suggest that ML models contain “unsafe tickets” responsible for harmful behaviors, and pruning reveals “safety tickets” that maintain performance while aligning outputs. This provides a lightweight, post-hoc alignment strategy suitable for deployment in resource-constrained settings.

Pruning Unsafe Tickets: A Resource-Efficient Framework for Safer and More Robust LLMs

Large reasoning models (LRMs) that generate long chains of thought now perform well on multi-step math, science, and coding tasks. However, their behavior is still unstable and hard to interpret, and existing analysis tools struggle with such long, structured reasoning traces. We introduce Step-Saliency, which pools attention--gradient scores into step-to-step maps along the question--thinking--summary trajectory. Across several models, Step-Saliency reveals two recurring information-flow failures: Shallow Lock-in, where shallow layers over-focus on the current step and barely use earlier context, and Deep Decay, where deep layers gradually lose saliency on the thinking segment and the summary increasingly attends to itself and the last few steps. Motivated by these patterns, we propose StepFlow, a saliency-inspired test-time intervention that adjusts shallow saliency patterns measured by Step-Saliency via Odds-Equal Bridge and adds a small step-level residual in deep layers via Step Momentum Injection. StepFlow improves accuracy on math, science, and coding tasks across multiple LRMs without retraining, indicating that repairing information flow can recover part of their missing reasoning performance.

Reasoning Fails Where Step Flow Breaks

In recent years, safety risks associated with large language models have become increasingly prominent, highlighting the urgent need to mitigate the generation of toxic and harmful content. The mainstream paradigm for LLM safety alignment typically adopts a collaborative framework involving three roles: an attacker for adversarial prompt generation, a defender for safety defense, and an evaluator for response assessment. In this paper, we propose a closed-loop reinforcement learning framework called \textbf{TriPlay-RL} that enables iterative and co-improving collaboration among three roles with near-zero manual annotation. Experimental results show that the attacker preserves high output diversity while achieving a 20\%--50\% improvement in adversarial effectiveness. The defender attains 10\%--30\% gains in safety performance without degrading general reasoning capability, and the evaluator continuously refines its fine-grained judgment ability through iterations, accurately distinguishing unsafe responses, simple refusals, and useful guidance. Overall, our framework establishes an efficient and scalable paradigm for LLM safety alignment, enabling continuous co-evolution within a unified learning loop. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/Qihoo360/TriPlay-RL}.

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Learning to Think on Hypergraph: HyperCoT for Structure-Guided N-ary Knowledge Graph Completion

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