United States

The rapid development of Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) raises concerns about watermarking for DLM-generated detection. However, existing sequential LLM watermarking cannot be directly applied to DLMs, as DLMs&#39; generation order is arbitrary. While emerging studies adapt biased LLM watermarking to DLMs by temporarily predicting the watermark prefix, they suffer from degraded quality and unstable watermarking due to bias accumulation and prediction errors. Besides, they cannot carry multi-bit watermarks. In this paper, we propose unbiased multi-bit watermarking for DLMs. We introduce a stability-aware constraint that allows watermarking only in stable contexts and a bit-controlled, unbiased modulation to preserve the original DLM output distribution, achieving stable watermarking with minimal quality impact. To enhance detection robustness, we design a \textit{Regret-based Remasking}, which grants a ``second chance&#39;&#39; for unwatermarked tokens to be regenerated. It can seamlessly integrate into DLM inference with no added diffusion steps and latency. Experiments across DLMs and various tasks show that our scheme is effective, achieving superior generation quality compared to baselines while maintaining high detection accuracy and multi-bit capacity. Our code is available here https://github.com/iieSKLCSDsg/UMR.

ACL 2026

You Can Have a Second Chance: Unbiased and Multi-bit Watermarking for Diffusion Language Models with Regret-based Remasking

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>
[Full Message from General Chair Philipp Koehn](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QiJFOmMjvDgsDo3i1XzlQnImxe3RU_Cy/view?usp=sharing) <br><br><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.

The rapid development of Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) raises concerns about watermarking for DLM-generated detection. However, existing sequential LLM watermarking cannot be directly applied to DLMs, as DLMs' generation order is arbitrary. While emerging studies adapt biased LLM watermarking to DLMs by temporarily predicting the watermark prefix, they suffer from degraded quality and unstable watermarking due to bias accumulation and prediction errors. Besides, they cannot carry multi-bit watermarks. In this paper, we propose unbiased multi-bit watermarking for DLMs. We introduce a stability-aware constraint that allows watermarking only in stable contexts and a bit-controlled, unbiased modulation to preserve the original DLM output distribution, achieving stable watermarking with minimal quality impact. To enhance detection robustness, we design a \textit{Regret-based Remasking}, which grants a ``second chance'' for unwatermarked tokens to be regenerated. It can seamlessly integrate into DLM inference with no added diffusion steps and latency. Experiments across DLMs and various tasks show that our scheme is effective, achieving superior generation quality compared to baselines while maintaining high detection accuracy and multi-bit capacity. Our code is available here https://github.com/iieSKLCSDsg/UMR.

technical paper

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a wide range of vision-language tasks. However, their performance as embodied agents, which requires multi-round interaction with spatial reasoning and sequential action prediction, needs further exploration. Our work investigates this potential in the context of Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) by introducing a unified and extensible simulation-free evaluation framework to probe MLLMs as zero-shot agents, named VLN-MME. Simplifying the evaluation with a highly modular and accessible design streamlines experiments, enabling structured comparisons and component-level ablations across diverse MLLM architectures, agent designs, and navigation tasks. Crucially, enabled by VLN-MME, we observe that enhancing prevalent agents with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning and self-reflection leads to an unexpected performance decrease. This suggests MLLMs exhibit poor context awareness in embodied navigation tasks; although they can follow instructions and structure their output, their 3D spatial reasoning fidelity is low. Furthermore, we demonstrate that agent performance could be largely improved with simple failure cases in context learning. VLN-MME lays the groundwork for systematic evaluation of general-purpose MLLMs in embodied navigation settings and reveals limitations in their sequential decision-making capabilities. We believe these findings offer crucial guidance for MLLM post-training as embodied agents.

VLN-MME: Diagnosing MLLMs as Language-guided Visual Navigation Agents

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is the dominant paradigm for training Large Language Model (LLM) agents on long-horizon tasks. However, sparse and delayed rewards often lead to trajectory neglect, in which agents lose focus on the task goal and interaction history at intermediate steps. Prior work has explored step-level supervision using Shannon-entropy–based uncertainty signals, which conflate inherent state complexity with agent confidence and therefore provide unreliable estimates of decision reliability. To address this issue, we propose normalized entropy, which measures confidence deviations relative to an agent’s average behavior under a given state, thereby strengthening the association between low-quality actions and trajectory neglect. Building on this insight, we introduce Selective Trajectory-Aware Policy Optimization (STAPO), a hierarchical group-based RL framework. STAPO leverages normalized entropy to locate outlier steps associated with trajectory neglect and optimizes them via a joint mechanism of trajectory-aware reward and trajectory-independent penalty, enhancing trajectory awareness while preserving training stability. Extensive experiments on ALFWorld, WebShop, and Search-Augmented QA demonstrate that STAPO achieves state-of-the-art performance while substantially alleviating trajectory neglect, validating its effectiveness and robustness for agentic tasks.

STAPO: Selective Trajectory-Aware Policy Optimization for LLM Agent Training

The "Fine-Tuning-as-a-Service" paradigm exposes large language models to catastrophic safety degradation from less harmful samples. Alignment-stage defenses address this by proactively injecting adversarial perturbations to bolster the model's inherent robustness against harmful drift. However, existing methods rely on perturbation directions that often conflict with harmful gradients, inadvertently facilitating the acquisition of malicious features rather than suppressing them. To address this issue, we propose Orthogonal and Adaptive Safety Alignment Strategy (OASIS) to mathematically decouple safety enforcement from harmful feature acquisition. By projecting perturbations orthogonal to harmful gradients and concentrating optimization on adaptively selected safety-critical layers, OASIS effectively resolves directional conflicts while maximizing parameter efficiency. Extensive experiments on four LLMs across three datasets (SST2, GSM8K, and AGNews) demonstrate that OASIS reduces the Harmful Score by approximately 60% compared to competitive baselines, while maintaining stable downstream task utility.

OASIS: Mitigating Harmful Fine-tuning Attacks on LLMs via Orthogonal and Adaptive Safety Alignment Strategy

Interleaved multimodal understanding and generation—where models can interactively comprehend and produce images and text in arbitrary orders—has emerged as a key research direction in generative Multimodal Large Language Models(MLLMs). Such interleaved image–text content plays an increasingly important role in information dissemination. However, the compounded persuasive power of multimodal narratives also raises the risk of factual misinformation. Despite this, existing benchmarks lack effective mechanisms to evaluate factual consistency in interleaved image–text content. To bridge this gap, we introduce FactVerse, a benchmark dedicated to evaluating factual consistency in interleaved image-text generation. FactVerse comprises 3,000 human-verified instances across four categories and 50 domains, supporting both English and Chinese. We also establish a multi-dimensional evaluation framework designed to rigorously assess factual consistency. Experiments demonstrate that our framework achieves high alignment with human judgments, significantly outperforming existing evaluation methods. Furthermore, our analysis reveals systematic deficiencies in current models, offering critical insights for future design.

FactVerse: A Benchmark for Factual Consistency in Interleaved Image–Text Generation

This paper proposes shortcut decoding, an efficient framework for accelerating Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning in Large Language Models (LLMs). Existing methods that prune or employ early stopping to reduce latency often compromise reasoning reliability. Motivated by the observation that LLMs frequently converge to correct solutions internally before completing explicit textual reasoning, we propose a dual-signal adaptive controller that integrates lightweight probes over internal hidden states with step-level entropy. This controller detects convergence of reasoning during generation and adaptively selects between a fast-exit path and a stability-verified path to remove redundant steps while preserving answer correctness. Experiments across multiple mathematical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that shortcut decoding reduces token usage by approximately 35%, maintains accuracy comparable to full CoT decoding, and achieves final-answer accuracy comparable to the full CoT baseline, outperforming existing early-stopping methods without updating the base model. Our code is available at https://github.com/kuromi9527/shortcut_decoding.

Think Faster Than Words: Efficient LLM Chain-of-Thought Reasoning via Dynamic Shortcut Decoding

Test-Time Reinforcement Learning (TTRL) enables Large Language Models (LLMs) to enhance reasoning capabilities on unlabeled test streams by deriving pseudo-rewards from majority voting consensus.
However, existing TTRL methods rely exclusively on positive pseudo-labeling strategies.
Such reliance becomes vulnerable under challenging scenarios where answer distributions are highly dispersed, resulting in weak consensus that inadvertently reinforces incorrect trajectories as supervision signals.
In this paper, we propose SCRL (Selective-Complementary Reinforcement Learning), a robust test-time reinforcement learning framework that effectively mitigates label noise amplification.
SCRL develops Selective Positive Pseudo-Labeling, which enforces strict consensus criteria to filter unreliable majorities. 
Complementarily, SCRL introduces Entropy-Gated Negative Pseudo-Labeling, the first negative supervision mechanism in TTRL, to reliably prune incorrect trajectories based on generation uncertainty. 
Extensive experiments on mathematical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that SCRL achieves substantial improvements over baselines, while maintaining robust generalization and training stability under constrained rollout budgets.

What If Consensus Lies? Selective-Complementary Reinforcement Learning at Test Time

Social bot accounts have long been disseminating disinformation and engaging in malicious activities on social media platforms. Detecting these social bots has become a critical and urgent task, essential for maintaining a healthy online ecosystem. Existing social bot detection research usually provides detection results directly without corresponding supportive explanations, making it difficult to assess the extent to which such predictions are trustworthy. This is a key concern for online moderation. In this work, we explore the detection interpretation and summarize a four-dimensional clue framework from individual and social perspectives. We propose CDRBot, which primarily employs outcome-reward reinforcement learning to train inspectors to generate faithful, grounded, and readable clues from the *User Information*, *Semantic Features*, *Interactive Situation*, and *Behavioral Pattern*. These clues are then integrated to make final predictions. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms other baselines in detection performance. The generated clues are faithful, grounded, and readable, and can significantly enhance the performance of large language models in social bot detection.

Exploring and Distilling Multi-Dimensional Clues for Interpretable Social Bot Detection

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has driven the deployment of LLM-based AI tutors on online learning platforms. This widespread adoption highlights an urgent need for systematic benchmarks to evaluate their tutoring capabilities. However, existing evaluations predominantly focus on isolated, short-term interactions, overlooking the inherently long-term nature of learning. To bridge this gap, we introduce LongTutor, a benchmark for long-term personalized tutoring grounded in formative assessment theory. Built from expert-annotated real-world learning logs, LongTutor evaluates LLMs across three progressive tasks: historical evidence acquisition, knowledge state diagnosis, and adaptive teaching action. Our experiments reveal a critical capability mismatch: while LLMs excel at evidence acquisition, they struggle to effectively leverage long-term history for accurate diagnosis and adaptive teaching. To enable scalable benchmark expansion, we further propose an automated generator–verifier pipeline, paving the way toward truly long-term AI tutoring systems.

LongTutor: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Long-term Personalized Tutoring

Currently, large language models (LLMs) have significant limitations in spatial reasoning, particularly in the absence of visual input. To address this issue, we introduce SODA (Spatial OODA), which draws inspiration from the OODA cognitive loop (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act), originally designed to enhance human decision-making in dynamic environments. Specifically, we embed the OODA loop into multiple control tasks, generating the SPOD-143k dataset, and successfully integrate it into LLMs through a two-phase and spatia-aware training strategy (SFT and GRPO). Furthermore, to fill the gap in evaluating spatial reasoning in purely text-based LLMs, we introduce the SPOD-Bench benchmark, including multiple tasks divided into three levels of difficulty. Experimental results show that SODA significantly enhances the spatial reasoning capabilities of LLMs across testing scenarios including SPOD-Bench, SPACE and applications, providing a replicable and effective paradigm for improving the spatial cognition of LLMs.

One Cognitive Loop Is Enough: SODA unlocks Pure-Text Spatial Reasoning in Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have remarkable capabilities, but adapting them to specialized domains poses a fundamental question: \textit{how should accumulated experience be represented and leveraged?} Existing approaches represent experience either as explicit textual artifacts in prompts (\textit{e.g.}, retrieved documents or dialogues) or implicitly within model weights via fine-tuning (\textit{e.g.}, LoRA adapters). However, textual methods are limited by context windows and cannot internalize knowledge, while parametric fine-tuning yields one adapter per task with minimal cross-task skill reuse. We propose \textbf{ReX} (\textbf{Re}usable e\textbf{X}perience), an experience-centric adaptation framework that treats latent experiences — recurring reasoning patterns and skills — as fundamental units for LLM specialization. Our method learns a shared Experience Bank of foundational skill vectors and uses a VAE-based encoder to map each input to a low-dimensional experience code. An Experience Router then dynamically composes the relevant skill vectors from this bank into a lightweight adapter for that input. By reusing skills across inputs, \textbf{ReX} enables implicit knowledge sharing across tasks without any explicit task identifiers. Experiments on multi-task NLP benchmarks show that this approach outperforms standard task-specific fine-tuning, yielding improved generalization through flexible skill reuse. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/iLearn-Lab/ACL26-ReX}.

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