United States

Large language models (LLMs) excel at general programming but struggle with domain-specific software development. This gap motivates research into domain specialization methods that enable LLMs to learn and utilize domain knowledge and data. However, existing domain-specific code benchmarks focus on assessing what knowledge LLMs possess rather than how they acquire and apply new knowledge, lacking explicit knowledge corpora for developing domain specialization methods. To this end, we present KOCO-bench, a novel benchmark designed for evaluating domain specialization methods in real-world software development. KOCO-bench contains 6 emerging domains with 11 software frameworks and 25 projects, featuring curated knowledge corpora alongside multi-granularity evaluation tasks including domain code generation (from function-level to project-level with rigorous test suites) and domain knowledge understanding (via multiple-choice Q&amp;A). Unlike previous benchmarks that only provide test sets for direct evaluation, KOCO-bench requires acquiring and applying diverse domain knowledge (APIs, rules, constraints, etc.) from the corpora to solve evaluation tasks. Our evaluations reveal that KOCO-bench poses significant challenges to state-of-the-art LLMs. Even with domain specialization methods (e.g., SFT, RAG, kNN-LM) applied, improvements remain marginal. Best-performing coding agent, Claude Code, achieves only 34.2%, highlighting the urgent need for more effective domain specialization methods. We release KOCO-bench, evaluation code, and baselines to advance further research at https://github.com/jiangxxxue/KOCO-bench.

ACL 2026

KoCo-Bench: Can Large Language Models Leverage Domain Knowledge in Software Development?

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>
<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>
<br><br><br><br>

To access this event page, you need to log in with the **email address you registered with**. <br>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.

**Online Registration Form**: https://acl.swoogo.com/acl2026

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.

Large language models (LLMs) excel at general programming but struggle with domain-specific software development. This gap motivates research into domain specialization methods that enable LLMs to learn and utilize domain knowledge and data. However, existing domain-specific code benchmarks focus on assessing what knowledge LLMs possess rather than how they acquire and apply new knowledge, lacking explicit knowledge corpora for developing domain specialization methods. To this end, we present KOCO-bench, a novel benchmark designed for evaluating domain specialization methods in real-world software development. KOCO-bench contains 6 emerging domains with 11 software frameworks and 25 projects, featuring curated knowledge corpora alongside multi-granularity evaluation tasks including domain code generation (from function-level to project-level with rigorous test suites) and domain knowledge understanding (via multiple-choice Q&A). Unlike previous benchmarks that only provide test sets for direct evaluation, KOCO-bench requires acquiring and applying diverse domain knowledge (APIs, rules, constraints, etc.) from the corpora to solve evaluation tasks. Our evaluations reveal that KOCO-bench poses significant challenges to state-of-the-art LLMs. Even with domain specialization methods (e.g., SFT, RAG, kNN-LM) applied, improvements remain marginal. Best-performing coding agent, Claude Code, achieves only 34.2%, highlighting the urgent need for more effective domain specialization methods. We release KOCO-bench, evaluation code, and baselines to advance further research at https://github.com/jiangxxxue/KOCO-bench.

poster

GUI agents that interact with graphical interfaces on behalf of users are a promising direction for practical AI assistants, yet training them is hindered by scarce suitable environments. We present InfiniteWeb, a system that automatically generates functional web environments at scale for GUI agent training. While LLMs perform well on generating a single webpage, building a realistic and functional website with many interconnected pages faces challenges. We address these challenges through unified specification, task-centric test-driven development, and combining website seed variation with reference design images. Our system also generates verifiable task evaluators enabling dense reward signals for reinforcement learning. Experiments show that our system surpasses commercial coding agents at realistic website construction, and GUI agents trained on our generated environments achieve significant performance improvements on OSWorld and Online-Mind2Web, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed system.

InfiniteWeb: Scalable Web Environment Synthesis for GUI Agent Training

Human infants, with only a few hundred hours of speech exposure, acquire basic units of new languages, highlighting a striking efficiency gap compared to the data-hungry self-supervised speech models. To address this gap, this paper introduces SpidR-Adapt for rapid adaptation of speech units to new languages using minimal unlabeled data. We cast such low-resource speech representation learning as a meta-learning problem and construct a multi-task adaptive pre-training (MAdaPT) protocol which formulates the adaptation process as a bi-level optimization framework. To enable scalable meta-training under this framework, we propose a novel heuristic solution, first-order bi-level optimization (FOBLO), avoiding heavy computation costs. Finally, we stabilize meta-training by using a robust initialization through interleaved supervision which alternates self-supervised and supervised objectives. Empirically, SpidR-Adapt achieves rapid gains in phonemic discriminability (ABX) and downstream spoken language modeling scores (sWUGGY, sBLIMP, tSC), surpassing in-domain toplines after training on less than 1h of target-language audio and delivering $100\times$ greater data efficiency than standard multi-task training.. These findings highlight a practical, architecture-agnostic path toward biologically inspired, data-efficient representations. We open-source the training code and model checkpoints at https://github.com/facebookresearch/spidr-adapt.

SpidR-Adapt: A Universal Speech Representation Model for Few-Shot Adaptation

Autonomous GUI agents based on vision-language models (VLMs) often assume deterministic environment responses, generating actions without verifying whether previous operations succeeded. In real-world settings with network latency, rendering delays, and system interruptions, this assumption leads to undetected action failures, repetitive ineffective behaviors, and catastrophic error accumulation. Moreover, learning robust recovery strategies is challenging due to the high cost of online interaction and the lack of real-time feedback in offline datasets.We propose VeriGUI (Verification-driven GUI Agent), which explicitly models action outcomes and recovery under noisy environments. VeriGUI introduces a Thinking--Verification--Action--Expectation (TVAE) framework to detect failures and guide corrective reasoning, and a two-stage training pipeline that combines Robust SFT with synthetic failure trajectories and GRPO with asymmetric verification rewards. We further construct a Robustness Benchmark based on AndroidControl to evaluate failure recognition and correction. Experiments show that VeriGUI significantly reduces failure loops and improves recovery success while maintaining competitive standard task performance.

Don't Act Blindly: Robust GUI Automation via Action-Effect Verification and Self-Correction

Pruning is essential for the efficient deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs); however, it causes severe performance degradation due to the structural distortion induced by sparsity.
Existing recovery strategies, such as LoRA, predominantly employ global fine-tuning, often overlooking the mechanistic root of this degradation: the layer-wise accumulation and amplification of local errors. 
To address this limitation, we propose LaCo(Layer-wise Compensation), a framework that reorients the recovery paradigm from global adaptation to hierarchical representation alignment.
By sequentially optimizing each layer to reconstruct the model's hidden states, LaCo effectively intercept the error propagation chain at its source.
Extensive experiments demonstrate that LaCo surpasses parameter-efficient baselines in both perplexity reduction and zero-shot reasoning.
Notably, it reduces recovery-time memory usage to approximately $1/7$ of the baseline and requires only 2,048 unlabeled samples to match a LoRA model trained on 50k examples—achieving a $\sim25\times$ improvement in data efficiency.

 LaCo: Layer-wise Compensation for Pruned Large Language Models

Previous work on cross-document event coreference resolution (CDECR) primarily focused on enhancing semantic coherence between event mentions, largely overlooking the critical aspect of temporal coherence. To address this issue, we propose CohTP, a novel Temporal Cohorence-driven event coreference framework. CohTP explicitly models and enforces temporal constraints by first constructing a temporal event graph via a fine-tuned natural language inference (NLI) model. The graph is then refined using an Edge-Aware GNN to resolve conflicts and partitioned into ordered time segments, where undirected edges group contemporaneous events. Event coreference resolution is subsequently performed within these temporally coherent segments, where event representations are further augmented with temporally consistent contexts. Experiments on the ECB+, GVC, WEC, and ECB+META datasets show that CohTP outperforms several state-of-the-art baselines.

Incorporating Temporal Coherence to Cross-Document Event Coreference Resolution

Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has become a widely adopted parameter-efficient fine-tuning method for large language models, with its effectiveness largely influenced by the allocation of ranks and scaling factors, as well as initialization. Existing LoRA variants typically address only one of these factors, often at the cost of increased training complexity or reduced practical efficiency.
In this work, we present Task-aware Low-Rank Adaptation (TLoRA), a unified framework that jointly optimizes initialization and resource allocation at the outset of training. TLoRA introduces a data-driven initialization strategy that aligns the LoRA $A$ matrix with task-relevant subspaces by performing singular value decomposition on the product of pre-trained weights and input activation covariance. After this, the $A$ matrix is frozen, and only the $B$ matrix is trained. Furthermore, TLoRA employs a sensitivity-based importance metric to adaptively allocate ranks and scaling factors across layers under a fixed parameter budget.
We conduct extensive experiments that demonstrate TLoRA consistently performs excellently across various tasks, including natural language understanding, commonsense reasoning, math reasoning, code generation, and chat generation, while significantly reducing the number of trainable parameters. Our code are available at https://github.com/Rambo-Yi/TLora/tree/main

 TLoRA: Task-aware Low Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) are versatile, yet their deployment in complex real-world settings is limited by static knowledge cutoffs and the difficulty of producing controllable behavior within a single inference. Multi-agent search systems (MASS), which coordinate specialized LLM agents equipped with search tools, mitigate these issues via task decomposition and retrieval-augmented problem solving. However, optimizing LLMs for agent-specific roles remains labor-intensive with prompt engineering or supervised fine-tuning, motivating automated end-to-end training. Existing multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) methods such as Multi-Agent Proximal Policy Optimization (MAPPO) typically depend on large critic networks to evaluate joint actions, leading to instability and high memory costs. We introduce Multi-Agent Heterogeneous Group Policy Optimization (MHGPO), which updates policies by estimating relative advantages across heterogeneous groups of multi-agent rollouts, shifting the optimization focus from local agent performance to global system success. We further study three group rollout sampling strategies to trade off sample efficiency and optimization quality. Experiments show that MHGPO captures implicit inter-agent dependencies and consistently outperforms strong baselines in both task performance and computational efficiency.

 End-to-End Optimization of LLM-Driven Multi-Agent Search Systems via Heterogeneous-Group-Based Reinforcement Learning

Generating radiology reports from 3D volumetric data remains challenging due to the difficulty of grounding fine-grained pathologies within high-dimensional scans. While retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) offers a potential solution, standard approaches struggle with visual-semantic ambiguity and often introduce irrelevant "normal" context that dilutes pathological signals. To address this limitation, we introduce CPR-RAG, a model-agnostic RAG framework that enhances organ-level grounding by integrating clinical priors into the retrieval process. Specifically, we propose a clinical prior-regularized re-ranking module that leverages corpus-derived co-occurrence statistics to align retrieved candidates with latent disease distributions, ensuring clinical consistency beyond mere visual similarity. Furthermore, we employ clinical relevance context refinement to selectively filter out boilerplate normal descriptions, thereby maximizing the information density of the evidence provided to the generator. Extensive experiments on the RadGenome-ChestCT benchmark demonstrate that CPR-RAG significantly improves clinical efficacy across state-of-the-art radiology report generation models. Human evaluation further confirms that our approach achieves superior factual correctness, completeness, and utility compared to the existing models.

 CPR-RAG: Clinical Prior-Regularized Retrieval for Anatomy-Aware 3D CT Report Generation

Deploying LLMs in real-world applications requires controllable output that satisfies multiple desiderata at the same time. While existing work extensively addresses LLM steering for a single behavior, compositional steering---i.e., steering LLMs simultaneously towards multiple behaviors---remains an underexplored problem. In this work, we propose compositional steering tokens for multi-behavior steering. We first embed individual behaviors, expressed as natural language instructions, into dedicated tokens via self-distillation. Contrary to most prior work, which operates in the activation space, our behavior steers live in the space of input tokens, enabling more effective zero-shot composition. We then train a dedicated composition token on pairs of behaviors and show that it successfully captures the notion of composition: it generalizes well to unseen compositions, including those with unseen behaviors as well as those with an unseen number of behaviors. Our experiments across different LLM architectures show that steering tokens lead to superior multi-behavior steering of verifiable constraints (e.g., length, format, structure, language) compared to competing approaches (instructions, activation steering, and LoRA merging). Moreover, we show that steering tokens complement natural language instructions, with their combination resulting in further gains.

Compositional Steering of Large Language Models with Steering Tokens

Test-time alignment methods offer a promising alternative to fine-tuning by steering the outputs of large language models (LLMs) at inference time with lightweight interventions on their internal representations. Recently, a prominent and effective approach, RE-Control (Kong et al., 2024), has proposed leveraging an external value function trained over the LLM's hidden states to guide generation via gradient-based editing. While effective, this method overlooks a key characteristic of alignment tasks, i.e. that they are typically formulated as learning from human preferences between candidate responses. To address this, in this paper we propose a novel preference-based training framework, **Pref-CTRL**, that uses a multi-objective value function to better reflect the structure of preference data. Our approach has outperformed RE-Control on two benchmark datasets and showed greater generalization on out-of-domain datasets. Our source code is available at https://github.com/UTS-nlPUG/pref-ctrl.

Downloads

Next from ACL 2026

InfiniteWeb: Scalable Web Environment Synthesis for GUI Agent Training

Similar lecture

KoCo: Conditioning Language Model Pre-training on Knowledge Coordinates