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Speculative decoding accelerates autoregressive generation by letting draft tokens bypass full verification, but conventional frameworks suffer from frequent false rejections, particularly when draft models produce semantically correct but lexically divergent outputs. In this paper, we present Calibrated Speculative Decoding (CSD), a training-free framework that recovers valid tokens discarded by standard verification. Guided by the principle of &quot;Frequency-Guided Candidate Selection and Probability-Guarded Acceptance,&quot; CSD incorporates two lightweight modules: Online Correction Memory, which aggregates historical rejections to propose recurring divergence patterns as rescue candidates, and Semantic Consistency Gating, which verifies candidate admissibility using probability ratios instead of exact token matching. Our evaluation across diverse large language models demonstrates that CSD outperforms existing methods, achieving a peak throughput speedup of 2.33x. CSD preserves model accuracy across all tasks while further boosting performance on complex reasoning datasets. These results establish CSD as a highly effective, lightweight solution for practical LLM deployments.

ACL 2026

Calibrated Speculative Decoding: Frequency-Guided Candidate Selection for Efficient Inference

### Welcome to 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Welcome to the 2025 meeting of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics! I am proud to help organize the first NAACL conference to carry the new name of our organization, one that emphasizes inclusion for all of the Americas. I am also pleased to welcome you to Albuquerque, New Mexico, a state whose unique blend of cultural influences will make for an excellent backdrop for NAACL 2025, especially with this year’s special theme on NLP in a Multicultural World. 
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*- Colin Cherry, Google, NAACL 2025 General Chair* 

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NAACL 2025

Welcome to 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Speculative decoding accelerates autoregressive generation by letting draft tokens bypass full verification, but conventional frameworks suffer from frequent false rejections, particularly when draft models produce semantically correct but lexically divergent outputs. In this paper, we present Calibrated Speculative Decoding (CSD), a training-free framework that recovers valid tokens discarded by standard verification. Guided by the principle of "Frequency-Guided Candidate Selection and Probability-Guarded Acceptance," CSD incorporates two lightweight modules: Online Correction Memory, which aggregates historical rejections to propose recurring divergence patterns as rescue candidates, and Semantic Consistency Gating, which verifies candidate admissibility using probability ratios instead of exact token matching. Our evaluation across diverse large language models demonstrates that CSD outperforms existing methods, achieving a peak throughput speedup of 2.33x. CSD preserves model accuracy across all tasks while further boosting performance on complex reasoning datasets. These results establish CSD as a highly effective, lightweight solution for practical LLM deployments.

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. 
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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.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used in education, yet their default helpfulness often conflicts with pedagogical principles. Prior work evaluates pedagogical quality via answer leakage–the disclosure of complete solutions instead of scaffolding–but typically assumes well-intentioned learners, leaving tutor robustness under student misuse largely unexplored. In this paper, we study scenarios where students behave adversarially and aim to obtain the correct answer from the tutor. We evaluate a broad set of LLM-based tutor models, including different model families, pedagogically aligned models, and a multi-agent design, under a range of adversarial student attacks. We adapt six groups of adversarial and persuasive techniques to the educational setting and use them to probe how likely a tutor is to reveal the final answer. We evaluate answer leakage robustness using different types of in-context adversarial student agents, finding that they often fail to carry out effective attacks. We therefore introduce an adversarial student agent that we fine-tune to jailbreak LLM-based tutors, which we propose as the core of a standardized benchmark for evaluating tutor robustness. Finally, we present simple but effective defense strategies that reduce answer leakage and strengthen the robustness of LLM-based tutors in adversarial scenarios.

 Evaluating Answer Leakage Robustness of LLM Tutors against Adversarial Student Attacks

Multimedia event extraction aims to jointly identify events and their arguments across multiple modalities, such as text and images, to support more comprehensive event understanding. While recent work reports steady and substantial progress, the reliability and comparability of these results critically depend on consistent and rigorous evaluation. In this work, we present the first systematic analysis of evaluation pitfalls in multimedia event extraction and identify three major sources of issues: inconsistent data processing, inconsistent task assumptions, and overly relaxed evaluation settings. We demonstrate, through a series of controlled experiments under a strict evaluation framework, that minor evaluation choices can cause large performance variations and lead to overestimation of a model’s ability to ground real-world events across modalities. Our findings highlight the need for comparable evaluation standards and encourage a shift toward more rigorous evaluation in multimedia event extraction.

Evaluation Pitfalls and Challenges in Multimedia Event Extraction

While scaling laws for large language models (LLMs) during pre-training have been extensively studied, their behavior under reinforcement learning (RL) post-training remains largely unexplored. This paper investigates the scaling behavior of Large Language Model (LLM) reinforcement learning post-training, focusing on mathematical reasoning. Through experiments across the Qwen2.5 series (0.5B to 72B), we characterize how model scale, data, and compute interact. Our analysis yields four key findings: 1. Larger models consistently demonstrate superior compute and data efficiency. 2. The relationship between model performance and training resources follows a **predictive power-law** across both base and instruction-tuned models. 3. RL learning efficiency exhibits a latent **saturation trend** with increasing model scale. 4. In data-constrained regimes, performance is primarily driven by the **total volume of training data** rather than sample uniqueness. These results offer practical guidelines for scaling reasoning capabilities through reinforcement learning post-training.

Scaling Behaviors of LLM Reinforcement Learning Post-Training: An Empirical Study in Mathematical Reasoning

Methods for controlling large language models (LLMs), including local weight fine-tuning, LoRA-based adaptation, and activation-based interventions, are often studied in isolation, obscuring their connections and making comparison difficult. In this work, we present a unified view that frames these interventions as dynamic weight updates induced by a control signal, placing them within a single conceptual framework. Building on this view, we propose a unified preference-utility analysis that separates control effects into preference, defined as the tendency toward a target concept, and utility, defined as coherent and task-valid generation, and measures both on a shared log-odds scale using polarity-paired contrastive examples. Across methods, we observe a consistent trade-off between preference and utility: stronger control increases preference while predictably reducing utility. We further explain this behavior through an activation manifold perspective, in which control shifts representations along target-concept directions to enhance preference, while utility declines primarily when interventions push representations off the model’s valid-generation manifold. Finally, we introduce a new steering approach guided by this analysis that improves preference while better preserving utility.

Why Steering Works: Toward a Unified View of Language Model Parameter Dynamics

Large language models (LLMs) show promise in drafting responses to patient portal messages, yet their integration into clinical workflows raises various concerns, including whether they would actually save clinicians time and effort in their portal workload. We investigate LLM alignment with individual clinicians through a comprehensive evaluation of the patient message response drafting task. We develop a novel taxonomy of thematic elements in clinician responses and propose a novel evaluation framework for assessing clinician editing load of LLM-drafted responses at both content and theme levels. We release an expert-annotated dataset and conduct large-scale evaluations of local and commercial LLMs using various adaptation techniques including thematic prompting, retrieval-augmented generation, supervised fine-tuning, and direct preference optimization. Our results reveal substantial epistemic uncertainty in aligning LLM drafts with clinician responses. While LLMs demonstrate capability in drafting certain thematic elements, they struggle with clinician-aligned generation in other themes, particularly question asking to elicit further information from patients. Theme-driven adaptation strategies yield improvements across most themes. Our findings underscore the necessity of adapting LLMs to individual clinician preferences to enable reliable and responsible use in patient-clinician communication workflows.

How Much Would a Clinician Edit This Draft? Evaluating LLM Alignment for Patient Message Response Drafting

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities on general text; however, their proficiency in specialized scientific domains that require deep, interconnected knowledge remains largely uncharacterized. Metabolomics presents unique challenges with its complex biochemical pathways, heterogeneous identifier systems, and fragmented databases. To systematically evaluate LLM capabilities in this domain, we introduce MetaBench, the first benchmark for metabolomics assessment. Curated from authoritative public resources, MetaBench evaluates five capabilities essential for metabolomics research: \emph{knowledge}, understanding, grounding, reasoning, and research. Our evaluation of 25 open- and closed-source LLMs reveals distinct performance patterns across metabolomics tasks: while models perform well on text generation tasks, cross-database identifier grounding remains challenging even with retrieval augmentation. Model performance also decreases on long-tail metabolites with sparse annotations. With MetaBench, we provide essential infrastructure for developing and evaluating metabolomics AI systems, enabling systematic progress toward reliable computational tools for metabolomics research.

MetaBench: A Multi-task Benchmark for Assessing LLMs in Metabolomics

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have recently demonstrated significant improvements in complex reasoning. While quantifying generation uncertainty in LRMs is crucial, traditional methods are often insufficient because they do not provide finite-sample guarantees for reasoning-answer generation. Conformal prediction (CP) stands out as a model-agnostic methodology that constructs statistically rigorous uncertainty sets. However, existing CP methods ignore the logical connection between the reasoning trace and the final answer. Additionally, prior studies fail to interpret the origins of uncertainty coverage for LRMs as they typically overlook the specific training factors driving valid reasoning. Notably, it is challenging to disentangle reasoning quality from answer correctness, while simultaneously establishing theoretical guarantees for computationally efficient explanation methods. To address these challenges, we first propose a novel methodology that provides the uncertainty of the reasoning-answer structure with statistical guarantees. Subsequently, we develop a unified example-to-step explanation framework using Shapley values that identifies a provably sufficient subset of training data and their specific reasoning steps sufficient to achieve coverage. We also provide the theoretical analysis for our proposed methods. Extensive experiments on challenging reasoning datasets verify the effectiveness of the proposed methods.

Quantifying and Understanding Uncertainty in Large Reasoning Models

AI Clones aim to simulate an individual’s thoughts and behaviors to enable long-term, personalized interaction, placing stringent demands on memory systems to model experiences, emotions, and opinions over time. Existing memory benchmarks primarily rely on user–agent conversational histories, which are temporally fragmented and insufficient for capturing continuous life trajectories. We introduce CloneMem, a benchmark for evaluating long-term memory in AI Clone scenarios grounded in non-conversational digital traces, including diaries, social media posts, and emails, spanning one to three years. CloneMem} adopts a top-down data construction framework to ensure longitudinal coherence and defines tasks that assess an agent’s ability to track evolving personal states. Experiments show that current memory mechanisms struggle in this setting, highlighting open challenges for life-grounded personalized AI. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/AvatarMemory/CloneMemBench

CloneMem: Benchmarking Long-Term Memory for AI Clones

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been reported to “leak” Personally Identifiable Information (PII), with successful PII reconstruction often interpreted as evidence of memorization. We propose a principled revision of memorization evaluation for LLMs, arguing that PII leakage should be evaluated under low lexical cue conditions, where target PII cannot be reconstructed through prompt-induced generalization or pattern completion. We formalize Cue-Resistant Memorization (CRM) as a cue-controlled evaluation framework and a necessary condition for valid memorization evaluation, explicitly conditioning on prompt-target overlap cues. Using CRM, we conduct a large-scale multilingual re-evaluation of PII leakage across 32 languages and multiple memorization paradigms. Revisiting reconstruction-based settings, including verbatim prefix-suffix completion and associative reconstruction, we find that their apparent effectiveness is driven primarily by direct surface-form cues rather than by true memorization. When such cues are controlled for, reconstruction success diminishes substantially. We further examine cue-free generation and membership inference, both of which exhibit extremely low true positive rates. Overall, our results suggest that previously reported PII leakage is better explained by cue-driven behavior than by genuine memorization, highlighting the importance of cue-controlled evaluation for reliably quantifying privacy-relevant memorization in LLMs.

Do LLMs Really Memorize Personally Identifiable Information? Revisiting PII Leakage with a Cue-Controlled Memorization Framework

Prevailing safety alignment methods still leave Large Language Models (LLMs) vulnerable to sophisticated jailbreak attacks. To bolster defenses, explicit reasoning mechanisms like Safety-oriented Chain-of-Thought (SCoT) have emerged, significantly enhancing robustness. However, this transparency introduces a critical trade-off: the exposed reasoning process itself becomes a new attack surface, risking the leakage of harmful information and revealing the model's safety logic to adversaries. This paper directly confronts this dilemma, asking: Can we achieve the full benefits of deliberative safety without the costs of explicit reasoning generation? We propose Safety Reasoning Internalization to make the deliberative process in SCoT "available but not visible". This approach is grounded in a key theoretical insight: the corrective influence of an SCoT can be effectively approximated by a targeted, low-rank update to the model's Feed-Forward Network (FFN) layers. We operationalize this through Hierarchical Internalization of Adversarially-Guided Reasoning (HIAR), a layer-wise safety alignment framework that internalizes safety reasoning into an implicit computational pathway using Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA). HIAR enables the model to reach a safe conclusion within a single forward pass, entirely eliminating the need to generate vulnerable SCoT text. Extensive experiments on various LLMs demonstrate that HIAR achieves a 43\% lower Attack Success Rate (ASR) against distinct jailbreak attacks compared to strong baselines.

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Evaluating Answer Leakage Robustness of LLM Tutors against Adversarial Student Attacks

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