United States

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.

ACL 2026

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

## 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) 
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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.

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.

 Probing Semantic Alignment, Lexical Invariance, and Syntactic Influence in LLM Metaphor Processing

Large Language Models (LLMs) extend their capabilities through function-calling (FC), which relies on training data with high quality, diversity, and broad coverage of scenario. However, obtaining and annotating real function-calling data is challenging, while synthetic data from existing pipelines often suffers from unreliable APIs, limited tool scalability, insufficient diversity, and weak quality control. To address these, we present GenesisFunc, an automated pipeline for generating FC training data. Starting from reliable tools in widely used public benchmarks, our GenesisFunc employs a multi-agent framework to support a dialogue generation system that produces conversations spanning diverse scenarios, while maintaining both diversity and quality throughout the process. The accuracy of the data is further reinforced through a multi-stage evaluation system. We fine-tune an 8B LLM on the synthetic dataset and show through extensive experiments that it outperforms similarly sized open-source models in in-domain FC performance and out-of-domain generalization, while reaching FC capabilities comparable to some of the latest API-based models. In addition, our method demonstrates strong potential to scale effectively across downstream tools, underscoring its real-world applicability.

GenesisFunc: Multi-Agent Data Generation for Accurate and Generalizable Function-Calling

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit highly anisotropic internal representations, often characterized by massive activations, a phenomenon where a small subset of feature dimensions possesses magnitudes significantly larger than the rest. While prior works view these extreme dimensions primarily as artifacts to be managed, we propose a distinct perspective: these dimensions serve as intrinsic interpretable functional units arising from domain specialization. Specifically, we propose a simple magnitude-based criterion to identify Domain-Critical Dimensions in a training-free manner. Our analyses reveal that such dimensions behave as interpretable semantic detectors for symbolic/quantitative patterns or domain-specific terms. In addition, we introduce Critical Dimension Steering, which applies activation steering exclusively to the identified dimensions. Empirical results show that this approach outperforms conventional whole-dimension steering in domain adaptation and jailbreaking scenarios.

 Embracing Anisotropy: Turning Massive Activations into Interpretable Control Knobs for Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have traditionally been aligned through one-size-fits-all approaches that assume uniform human preferences, fundamentally overlooking the diversity in user values and needs. This paper introduces a comprehensive framework for scalable personalized alignment of LLMs. We establish a systematic preference space characterizing psychological and behavioral dimensions, alongside diverse persona representations for robust preference inference in real-world scenarios. Building upon this foundation, we introduce AlignX, a large-scale dataset of over 1.3 million personalized preference examples, and develop two complementary alignment approaches: in-context alignment directly conditioning on persona representations and preference-bridged alignment modeling intermediate preference distributions. Extensive experiments demonstrate substantial improvements over existing methods, with an average 17.06\% accuracy gain across four benchmarks while exhibiting a strong adaptation capability to novel preferences, robustness to limited user data, and precise preference controllability. These results validate our approach toward user-adaptive AI systems.

From 1,000,000 Users to Every User: Scaling Up Personalized Preference for User-level Alignment

The goal of this work is to develop a universal approach for aligning subtitles (i.e., spoken language text with corresponding timestamps) to continuous sign language videos. Prior approaches typically rely on end-to-end training tied to a specific language or dataset, which limits their generality. In contrast, our method Segment, Embed, and Align (SEA) provides a single framework that works across multiple languages and domains. SEA leverages two pretrained models: the first to segment a video sequence into individual signs and the second to embed each sign video clip into a shared latent space with text. Alignment is subsequently performed with a lightweight dynamic programming procedure that runs efficiently on CPU within a minute, even for hour-long episodes. SEA is flexible and can adapt to a wide range of scenarios, utilizing resources from small lexicons to large continuous corpora. Experiments on four sign language datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art alignment performance, highlighting the potential of SEA to generate high-quality parallel data for advancing sign language processing.

Segment, Embed, and Align: A Universal Recipe for Aligning Subtitles to Signing

Prior work has shown that large language models (LLMs) often converge to accurate input embedding for numbers, based on sinusoidal representations.
In this work, we demonstrate that these representations are in fact strikingly systematic, to the point of being almost perfectly universal: different LLM families develop equivalent sinusoidal structures, and number representations are broadly interchangeable in a large swathe of experimental setups.
We show that properly factoring in this characteristic is crucial when it comes to assessing how accurately LLMs encode numeric and other ordinal information, and that mechanistically enhancing this sinusoidality can also lead to reductions of LLMs' arithmetic errors.

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