United States

Block-wise discrete diffusion offers an attractive balance between parallel generation and causal dependency modeling, making it a promising backbone for vision-language modeling. However, its practical adoption has been limited by high training cost, slow convergence, and instability, which have so far kept it behind strong autoregressive (AR) baselines. We present \textbf{SDAR-VL}, the first systematic application of block-wise discrete diffusion to large-scale vision-language understanding (VLU), together with an \emph{integrated framework for efficient and stable training}. This framework unifies three components: 1) \textbf{Asynchronous Block-wise Noise Scheduling} to diversify supervision within each batch; 2) \textbf{Effective Mask Ratio Scaling} for unbiased loss normalization under stochastic masking; and 3) a \textbf{Progressive Beta Noise Curriculum} that increases effective mask coverage while preserving corruption diversity. Experiments on 21 single-image, multi-image, and video benchmarks show that SDAR-VL consistently improves \emph{training efficiency}, \emph{convergence stability}, and \emph{task performance} over conventional block diffusion. On this evaluation suite, SDAR-VL sets a new state of the art among diffusion-based vision-language models and, under matched settings, matches or surpasses strong AR baselines such as LLaVA-OneVision as well as the global diffusion baseline LLaDA-V, establishing block-wise diffusion as a practical backbone for VLU.

ACL 2026

SDAR-VL: Stable and Efficient Block-wise Diffusion for Vision-Language Understanding

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

technical paper

Current LLM role-playing systems model persona as a monolithic, static attribute, conflating identity consistency with emotional rigidity. This leads to either robotic repetition or catastrophic persona drift under sustained interaction. We introduce Dynamic Persona Coherence, a framework that decouples Identity-Layer Stability (time-invariant traits) from Adaptive-Layer Appropriateness (history-dependent psychological evolution). We operationalize this through the L/M/S Psychological State Model, which represents persona dynamics across long-term identity, mid-term meaning/stress accumulation, and short-term affect. On top of this state representation, a closed-loop alignment system comprising an automated evaluator (Persona Consistency Critic, PCC), a selective repository (Persona Case Repository, PCR), and a trajectory-adjusting corrector (Persona Drift Suppressor, PDS) enables autonomous coherence repair. Experiments on GPT-4o, Claude-3.5-Sonnet, and DeepSeek-V3.2 demonstrate consistent improvements (+16–84% PCC gains).

Beyond Static Persona Consistency: Dynamic Persona Coherence in LLM Role-Playing

Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve strong program repair performance but often suffer from over-editing, where excessive modifications overwrite correct code and hinder bug localization. We systematically quantify its impact and introduce precise repair task, which maximizes reuse of correct code while fixing only buggy parts. Building on this insight, we propose PRepair, a framework that mitigates over-editing and improves repair accuracy. PRepair has two components: Self-Breaking, which generates diverse buggy programs via controlled bug injection and min–max sampling, and Self-Repairing, which trains models with Edit-Aware Group Relative Policy Optimization (EA-GRPO) using an edit-aware reward to encourage minimal yet correct edits. Experiments show that PRepair improves repair precision by up to 31.4% under $\mathrm{fix}_1@1$, a metric that jointly considers repair correctness and extent, and significantly increases decoding throughput when combined with speculative editing, demonstrating its potential for precise and practical code repair.

QiMeng-PRepair: Precise Code Repair via Edit-Aware Reward Optimization

Credit assignment is a fundamental challenge in cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning, particularly in embodied AI settings characterized by limited and delayed feedback as well as dynamically changing numbers of active agents. We propose MARS-RA, a framework that reformulates credit assignment as a rank aggregation problem using contribution-based pairwise comparisons among agents generated by large multimodal models. This shift from absolute to relative estimation ensures robustness against noise and dynamic agent participation, converting comparison results into contribution scores for potential-based reward shaping. We provide theoretical justification for the convergence and robustness of the proposed framework, and show that Shapley values can be used as an interpretive reference. Experimental results on challenging tasks of different types indicate that MARS-RA can guide agents toward effective cooperation.

MARS-RA: Rank Aggregation for Credit Assignment via Multimodal Comparisons in Embodied Multi-Agent Cooperation

Guqin (古琴) Jianzi (減字) is an open and freely compositional tablature system that encodes performance actions rather than acoustic outcomes. Its automatic recognition remains largely unexplored, as conventional OCR assumes a closed and enumerable glyph set and struggles with Jianzi’s unbounded composition and manuscript-level variability.

We introduce Zero-shot Jianzi Recognition, which formulates Jianzi recognition as vision-to-sequence prediction of canonical component sequences under a zero-shot split. To enable scalable supervision, we construct Synthetic-JZ from aligned online composition metadata. We then synthesize manuscript-like training images via component-wise style recomposition and manuscript-domain noise modeling, and fine-tune a vision–language model for end-to-end component sequence recognition. At inference time, a lightweight legality-guided correction module re-ranks decoding candidates, suppressing structural hallucinations without modifying the backbone.

Experiments on two benchmarks show that our method achieves 63.02% sequence accuracy on Real-JZ, our manually annotated real-world Jianzi benchmark, surpassing Gemini-3-Pro by 35.11%. This result highlights the feasibility of reliable automated Jianzi recognition and its potential for large-scale digitization of historical Guqin Jianzi Pu manuscripts.

Zero-shot Jianzi Recognition as Structured Visual Information Extraction in Open Compositional Symbolic Systems

Recently, activation steering has attracted considerable attention as a low-cost approach to improving the safety of large language models (LLMs). However, most existing methods apply interventions indiscriminately, often causing excessive refusal of benign queries. Although recent works have begun to explore selective intervention, their intervention decisions typically rely on residual stream activations where information is highly entangled, resulting in limited discriminative power and unreliable interventions. To address this issue, we propose FFN-Guided activation steering (FGAS). Motivated by the observation that feed-forward networks (FFNs) in LLMs serve as core modules for knowledge storage, we propose leveraging FFN output activations as more discriminative signals for intervention, since these activations more explicitly reflect the intent of a query. For a given query, FGAS projects the corresponding FFN output activation into a low-dimensional subspace that effectively separates harmful and benign queries, and then makes precise intervention decisions by assessing its similarity to pre-constructed prototype activations representing harmful and benign classes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FGAS achieves state-of-the-art defense performance against various jailbreak attacks, while nearly preserving the model's original performance on benign tasks.

Detecting What Queries Seek: Steering LLM Safety with FFN Output Activation Monitoring

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved strong performance in general machine translation, yet their ability in culture-aware scenarios remains poorly understood. To bridge this gap, we introduce CanMT, a Culture-Aware Novel-Driven Parallel Dataset for Machine Translation, together with a theoretically grounded, multi-dimensional evaluation frame work for assessing cultural translation quality. Leveraging CanMT, we systematically evaluate a wide range of LLMs and translation systems under different translation strategy constraints. Our findings reveal substantial performance disparities across models and demonstrate that translation strategies exert a systematic influence on model behavior. Further analysis shows that translation difficulty varies across types of culture-specific items, and that a persistent gap remains between models’recognition of culture-specific knowledge and their ability to correctly operationalize it in translation outputs. In addition, incorporating reference translations is shown to substantially improve evaluation reliability in LLM-as-a-judge, underscoring their essential role in assessing culture-aware translation quality. The corpus and code are available at CanMT.

Culture-Aware Machine Translation in Large Language Models: Benchmarking and Investigation

We present a multilingual coreference dataset of 827k tokens of fiction in 7 languages: Bahasa Indonesia, Chinese, Dutch, English, Italian, Korean, and Spanish. The dataset includes full stories of diverse lengths, ranging from 500 to 17k words. We discuss our annotation scheme focusing on characters and language-specific challenges we encountered. Finally we present evaluation results of a neural coreference system trained on our dataset. We show that jointly training a system across all languages provides a strong improvement over monolingually trained models. The dataset is available under a creative commons license in CoNLL-2012 and CorefUD format at https://github.com/GOLEM-lab/GOLEMcoref/

GOLEMcoref: A Multilingual Coreference Dataset of Fiction

Cross-lingual chain-of-thought (XCoT) with self-consistency markedly enhances multilingual reasoning, yet existing methods remain costly due to extensive sampling of full trajectories across languages. Moreover, multilingual LLM representations vary strongly by language, hindering direct feature comparisons and effective pruning. To address this, we introduce UL-XCoT, the first efficient unified logic cross-lingual reasoning framework that minimizes redundancy in token usage and latency, yielding the greatest efficiency under limited sampling budgets during inference. Specifically, UL-XCoT (1) achieves less languages by selecting, per query, a small candidate language set in a language-invariant unified logic space, (2) enables less tokens by monitoring logic-space trajectory dynamics during decoding to prune low-quality reasoning paths, and (3) aggregates the remaining high-quality trajectories via voting. Experiments on PolyMath across 18 languages with DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-7B demonstrate that UL-XCoT achieves competitive accuracy while sharply cutting over 50% decoding token cost and latency versus prior sampling baselines. It also delivers more stable gains on low-resource languages, underscoring consistently superior robustness where standard XCoT self-consistency method fails.

Less Languages, Less Tokens: An Efficient Unified Logic Cross-lingual Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Framework

Large Language Model-based Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in complex tasks. However, manually designing optimal communication topologies is labor-intensive, while automated expansion methods often result in bloated structures with redundant agents, leading to excessive token consumption. To address this problem, we introduce AgentSlimming, a plug-and-play compression framework for graph-structured multi-agent workflows. Motivated by the AgentPruner and AgentQuant in neural networks, AgentSlimming compresses workflows by firstly estimate the importance score of each agent with a hybrid mechanism, and then removing redundant agents or replacing them with low-cost ones, where each operation is then validated with a baseline-anchored acceptance rule to prevent performance collapse. Experiments show that AgentSlimming reduces average token cost by up to 78.9% with negligible performance degradation, and even sometimes improves accuracy, achieving a strong Pareto-optimal trade-off between cost and quality.

AgentSlimming: Towards Efficient and Cost-Aware Multi-Agent Systems

Existing jamming attacks on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems typically induce explicit refusals or denial-of-service behaviors, which are conspicuous and easy to detect. In this work, we formalize a subtler availability threat, termed soft failure, which degrades system utility by inducing fluent and coherent yet non-informative responses rather than overt failures. We propose Deceptive Evolutionary Jamming Attack (DEJA), an automated black-box attack framework that generates adversarial documents to trigger such soft failures by exploiting safety-aligned behaviors of large language models. DEJA employs an evolutionary optimization process guided by a fine-grained Answer Utility Score (AUS), computed via an LLM-based evaluator, to systematically undermine the certainty of answers while maintaining high retrieval success.
Extensive experiments across multiple RAG configurations and benchmark datasets show that DEJA consistently drives responses toward low-utility soft failures and that the resulting adversarial documents maintain high stealth and effectiveness, proving resilient against common mitigation strategies including perplexity-based detection and input perturbations.

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Beyond Static Persona Consistency: Dynamic Persona Coherence in LLM Role-Playing

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