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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.

ACL 2026

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

## 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.

technical paper

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.

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}.

Reusable Experiences: Latent Routing and Modular Composition in LLMs

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance across diverse tasks, largely driven by large-scale pretraining. However, this data abundance introduces test data contamination, where benchmark datasets overlap with pretraining corpora, undermining the reliability of model evaluation by confounding memorization with genuine generalization. To mitigate this issue, existing training data detectors attempt to identify clean (unseen) samples from contaminated test sets, but often suffer from residual contamination due to the black-box nature of LLMs. As a result, contaminated data may be mistakenly retained, leading to unreliable evaluation.To address this challenge, we propose FTD (FDR-controlled Training Data detection), a principled framework that detects and filters contaminated evaluation data while providing a statistical guarantee: the proportion of contaminated samples mistakenly retained as clean, the false discovery rate (FDR), is provably controlled below a user-specified threshold. FTD combines multiple complementary detectors via an adaptive weighting strategy, and we theoretically show it achieves high statistical power under valid FDR control. Extensive experiments on real-world benchmarks demonstrate that FTD significantly reduces residual contamination compared to existing methods while preserving evaluation consistency.

Controllable Contamination Detection for Reliable LLM Evaluation with Statistical Guarantees

Low-resource multilingual OCR faces a dual challenge: complex script structures and severe data scarcity. In such settings, existing OCR models often struggle, as coarse visual representations combined with weak linguistic priors lead to frequent errors among visually similar characters.
To address this, we present BASA (Beyond Atomic Sub-character Alignment), a OCR framework built upon high-resolution visual and language backbones with a novel glyph-aware interface. The core technical contribution is the Glyph-Aware Fine-grained Adapter (GAFA). Unlike standard linear projectors, GAFA employs learnable glyph prototypes to actively align sub-character structural primitives (e.g., strokes and radicals) with visual features, explicitly resolving topological ambiguities during vision–language alignment. To complement this, we introduce a two-stage curriculum learning strategy supported by a Glyph-Aware Reverse Synthesis pipeline, which generates large-scale multilingual training corpora with automatic, zero-cost component labels. Furthermore, we construct BASA-Bench, a representative benchmark spanning 11 languages with diverse script structures and 23 authentic scenarios. Experiments demonstrate that BASA achieves consistent improvements over strong OCR baselines, particularly on scripts with complex compositions. Our model and benchmark will be available at \url{https://github.com/NcutLLM/BASA}.

Beyond Atomic Characters: Glyph-Aware Sub-character Alignment for Low-Resource Multilingual OCR

With the rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs), automated code generation has made remarkable progress. Recent studies explore multi-agent collaboration and adopt planning–coding–debugging workflows to enhance performance. However, these approaches are constrained by rigid, predefined workflows that fail to flexibly adjust their plans and lack effective verification of intermediate reasoning steps. In this work, we propose MavenCoder, a model-adaptive and verification–enhanced framework for competition-level code generation. MavenCoder leverages adaptive assessment aligned with the model’s capabilities to select planning strategies, while providing timely feedback and correction via multi-perspective verification. This adaptive problem-solving paradigm mitigates earlier limitations by enabling flexible planning and timely error correction. Compared with existing state-of-the-art approaches, MavenCoder achieves superior pass@1 results across multiple benchmarks, achieving 87.5% on LiveCodeBench, 93.9% on HumanEval+, 81.7% on MBPP+, and 46.1% on CodeContests, outperforming recent agent-based systems with improvement exceeding 3%--40%.

MavenCoder: Competitive Code Generation via Model Adaptive Planning Strategies and Multi-Perspective Verification Enhancement

Existing facial forgery detection methods typically focus on binary classification or pixel-level localization, providing little semantic insight into the nature of the manipulation. To address this, we introduce \textbf{Forgery Attribution Report Generation}, a new multimodal task designed to provide post-hoc forensic evidence for manipulated images. This task jointly localizes forged regions (``Where``) and generates natural language explanations grounded in the editing process (``Why``). This dual-focus approach goes beyond traditional binary forensics, providing a comprehensive, interpretable understanding of the manipulation. To enable research in this domain, we present \textbf{Multi-Modal Tamper Tracing (MMTT)}, a large-scale dataset of 152,217 samples. Each sample features a process-derived ground-truth mask and a human-authored textual description, ensuring high annotation precision and linguistic richness. We further propose \textbf{ForgeryTalker}, a unified end-to-end baseline that integrates vision and language via a shared encoder and dual decoders for mask and text generation. Experiments show that ForgeryTalker achieves competitive performance on both subtasks, i.e., 59.3 CIDEr and 73.67 IoU, establishing a strong baseline for explainable multimedia forensics. Our dataset and code are available at: https://github.com/NattyLianJc/Generating-Attribution-Reports.

Generating Attribution Reports for Manipulated Facial Images: A Dataset and Baseline

Large language model (LLM)-based multi-agent systems (MAS) have shown strong capabilities in solving complex tasks. As MAS become increasingly autonomous in various safety-critical tasks, detecting malicious agents has become a critical security concern. Although existing graph anomaly detection (GAD)-based defenses can identify anomalous agents, they mainly rely on coarse sentence-level information and overlook fine-grained lexical cues, leading to suboptimal performance. Moreover, the lack of interpretability in these methods limits their reliability and real-world applicability. To address these limitations, we propose \ourmethod, an explainable and fine-grained safeguarding framework for detecting malicious agents in MAS. To incorporate both coarse and fine-grained textual information for anomalous agent identification, we utilize a bi-level agent encoder to jointly model the sentence- and token-level representations of each agent. A theme-based anomaly detector further captures the evolving discussion focus in MAS dialogues, while a bi-level score fusion mechanism quantifies token-level contributions for explanation. Extensive experiments across diverse MAS topologies and attack scenarios demonstrate robust detection performance and strong interpretability of XG-Guard.

Explainable and Fine-Grained Safeguarding of LLM Multi-Agent Systems via Bi-Level Graph Anomaly Detection

The widespread integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) necessitates rigorous and systematic safety evaluation. Existing paradigms either rely on constructed benchmarks to assess safety from predefined perspectives, or employ dynamic red-teaming to probe potential vulnerabilities. While effective, these approaches face challenges, as they depend heavily on expert domain knowledge, offer limited systematic guarantees, and are vulnerable to rapid obsolescence. To address these limitations, we introduce a novel framework POLARIS that brings the rigor of specification-based software testing to AI safety. POLARIS first compiles unstructured natural-language policies into First-Order Logic (FOL) representations, establishing a traceable link between high-level rules and concrete test cases. This formalization enables the construction of a Semantic Policy Graph, where complex policy violation scenarios are encoded as traversable paths. By systematically exploring this graph, POLARIS uncovers compositional violation patterns, which are then instantiated into executable natural-language test queries, enabling coverage-driven and reproducible safety testing. Experiments demonstrate that POLARIS achieves higher policy coverage and attack success counts compared to established baselines. Crucially, by bridging formal methods and AI safety, POLARIS provides a principled, automated approach to ensuring LLMs adhere to safety-critical policies with verifiable traceability.

Inverting the Shield: Systematically Generating Safety Tests from Policy Specifications

Entity alignment (EA) aims to identify entities across different knowledge graphs (KGs) that refer to the same real-world object and plays a critical role in knowledge fusion and integration. Traditional EA methods mainly rely on knowledge representation learning, but their performance is often limited under noisy or sparsely supervised scenarios. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have been introduced to EA and achieved notable improvements by leveraging rich semantic knowledge. However, existing LLM-based EA approaches typically treat LLMs as black-box decision makers, resulting in limited interpretability, and the direct use of large-scale triples substantially increases inference cost. To address these challenges, we propose \textbf{EA-Agent}, a reasoning-driven agent for EA. EA-Agent formulates EA as a structured reasoning process with multi-step planning and execution, enabling interpretable alignment decisions. Within this process, it introduces attribute and relation triple selectors to filter redundant triples before feeding them into the LLM, effectively addressing efficiency challenges. Experimental results on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that EA-Agent consistently outperforms existing EA methods and achieves state-of-the-art performance. The source code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/EA-Agent-5696.

EA-Agent: A Structured Multi-Step Reasoning Agent for Entity Alignment

Large language models increasingly serve as conversational agents that adopt personas and role-play characters at user request. This capability, while valuable, raises concerns about sycophancy: the tendency to provide responses that validate users rather than prioritize factual accuracy. While prior work has established that sycophancy poses risks to AI safety and alignment, the relationship between specific personality traits of adopted personas and the degree of sycophantic behavior remains unexplored. We present a systematic investigation of how persona agreeableness influences sycophancy across 13 small, open-weight language models ranging from 0.6B to 20B parameters. We develop a benchmark comprising 275 personas evaluated on NEO-IPIP agreeableness subscales and expose each persona to 4,950 sycophancy-eliciting prompts spanning 33 topic categories. Our analysis reveals that 9 of 13 models exhibit statistically significant positive correlations between persona agreeableness and sycophancy rates, with Pearson correlations reaching $r = 0.87$ and effect sizes as large as Cohen's $d = 2.33$. These findings demonstrate that agreeableness functions as a reliable predictor of persona-induced sycophancy, with direct implications for the deployment of role-playing AI systems and the development of alignment strategies that account for personality-mediated deceptive behaviors

Too Nice to Tell the Truth: Quantifying Agreeableness-Driven Sycophancy in Role-Playing Language Models

Vision-language model-based mobile agents have gained the ability to understand complex instructions and mobile screenshots, benefiting from reinforcement learning paradigms like Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). However, existing approaches centers on offline training or local action-level rewards often trap agents in local optima, hindering effective exploration and error correction with the environment. Crucially, we find that directly applying task-level rewards often leads to convergence difficulties due to the sparse nature of GUI interactions. To address these challenges, we present \textbf{Mobile-R1}, a systematic training recipe that bridges atomic action execution and strategic task completion. We propose a hierarchical curriculum consisting of three stages: (1) format alignment for reasoning structure, (2) on-policy exploration with verifiable action feedback to ground basic execution, and (3) multi-turn task-level training with realistic environment to unlock exploration and self-correction. This hierarchical strategy effectively bootstraps the agent, significantly enhancing its capability for exploration and self-correction (the ``Eureka'' moments). Furthermore, addressing the critical scarcity of diverse GUI data in non-English ecosystems, we contribute a comprehensive Chinese mobile dataset covering 28 applications with 24,521 high-quality manual annotations, and establish a rigorous benchmark with 500 trajectories. We will open source all resources, including the dataset, benchmark, model weight, and codes: \url{https://mobile-r1.github.io/Mobile-R1/}.

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