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Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) is the standard approach for adapting large language models (LLMs) to downstream tasks. However, we observe a persistent failure mode: even after convergence, models often fail to correctly reproduce a subset of their own supervised training data. We refer to this behavior as the Incomplete Learning Phenomenon (ILP). This paper presents the first systematic study of ILP in LLM fine-tuning. We formalize ILP as post-training failure to internalize supervised instances and demonstrate its prevalence across multiple model families, domains, and datasets. Through controlled analyses, we identify five recurrent sources of incomplete learning: (1) missing prerequisite knowledge in the pre-trained model, (2) conflicts between SFT supervision and pre-training knowledge, (3) internal inconsistencies within SFT data, (4) left-side forgetting during sequential fine-tuning, and (5) insufficient optimization for rare or complex patterns. We introduce a diagnostic-first framework that maps unlearned samples to these causes using observable training and inference signals, and study several targeted mitigation strategies as causal interventions. Experiments on Qwen, LLaMA, and OLMo2 show that incomplete learning is widespread and heterogeneous, and that improvements in aggregate metrics can mask persistent unlearned subsets. The findings highlight the need for fine-grained diagnosis of what supervised fine-tuning fails to learn, and why.

ACL 2026

Why Supervised Fine-Tuning Fails to Learn: A Systematic Study of Incomplete Learning 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.

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. 
[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.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) enable cross-modal semantic understanding and generation by learning semantic alignment and fusion across modalities. However, existing MLLMs still face challenges in fine-grained visual tasks. Their uniform encoding for global understanding tends to blur or lose local details, while the lack of explicit modeling of intermediate visual evidence leads them to rely on semantic priors or the statistical patterns of language models rather than grounded visual information, resulting in potential hallucinations. To address these issues, we propose HiPerson, a training-free hierarchical perception-reasoning framework that enhances fine-grained visual understanding by simulating human perception mechanisms. Specifically, HiPerson fuses internal relative attention and gradient activation signals to generate a task-aware semantic heatmap, providing explicit perceptual anchors for precise localization. Then, it employs a dual-scale adaptive cropping strategy to extract visual cues for interactive reasoning, simulating the process of human visual focus shifting and detail attention. Finally, by combining local-global dual-image cooperative input with a multi-step reasoning prompting mechanism, HiPerson guides the model to complete a full perception loop from detail observation to contextual verification. Experiments show that HiPerson achieves competitive results on multiple datasets, demonstrating its generalizability and scalability.

Beyond the Panorama: Training-Free Hierarchical Perception-Reasoning for Fine-Grained Vision in MLLMs

While large language models (LLMs) have shown to perform well on monolingual mathematical and commonsense reasoning, they remain unreliable for multilingual medical reasoning applications, hindering their deployment in multilingual healthcare settings. We address this by first introducing CURE-Med-Bench, a high-quality multilingual medical reasoning dataset with open-ended reasoning queries with a single verifiable answer, spanning thirteen languages, including underrepresented languages such as Amharic, Yoruba, and Swahili. Building on this dataset, we propose CURE-Med, a curriculum-informed reinforcement learning framework that integrates code-switching-aware supervised fine-tuning and Group Relative Policy Optimization to jointly improve logical correctness and language stability. Across thirteen languages, our approach consistently outperforms strong baselines and scales effectively, achieving 85.21% language consistency and 54.35% logical correctness at 7B parameters and 94.96% language consistency and 70.04% logical correctness at 32B parameters. These results support reliable and equitable multilingual medical reasoning in LLMs. The code and dataset will be made publicly available upon acceptance.

CURE-Med: Curriculum-Informed Reinforcement Learning for Multilingual Medical Reasoning

Explicit knowledge conflicts, where retrieved contexts contain contradictory information, have become increasingly prevalent as Large Language Models (LLMs) integrate diverse data sources. The core challenge lies in the complexity of entangled narratives and the heterogeneity of conflict cases, which impose excessive demands on the reasoning capabilities of standard models. To address this, we propose \textbf{K}nowledge \textbf{C}onflict \textbf{R}easoning (\textbf{KCR}), a framework that adjudicates conflicts by structuring the underlying logic. KCR first disentangles conflicting contexts into distinct sets of reasoning traces, utilizing both textual and graph-based representations, to simplify comprehension. It then employs a Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) paradigm, guiding the model to internalize a reasoning process that maximizes logical consistency while actively suppressing spurious reasoning paths derived from contradictory contexts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that KCR yields substantial improvements: a KCR-enhanced 7B model surpasses the performance of baselines equipped with top-tier closed-source models such as GPT-4o and GPT-5.1.

 Disentangling Reasoning Logic to Resolve Explicit Knowledge Conflicts

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have improved logical reasoning by injecting formal logic or explicit structured representations. However, such methods often lose track of what is true now in multi-step reasoning, failing to maintain a coherent global state and its logical consequences. Motivated by Situation Model Theory in cognitive psychology, which views comprehension as constructing and updating a mental model of events along key dimensions (time, space, causality, intention, protagonist), we propose Situation Working Memory (SituW), a cognitively inspired method for contextual reasoning in LLMs. SituW first builds a situation representation by decomposing text along these five dimensions, then guides LLM inference with this evolving state. Keeping an explicit, dynamically updated situation memory instead of a static logical form encourages globally consistent reasoning over the situation model rather than raw text. Evaluated in both supervised and unsupervised settings, SituW improves accuracy by 23.3%p and 15.93%p while reducing “uncertain” predictions, suggesting that explicit situation modeling supports more globally consistent LLM reasoning.

 Injecting Context via Situation Working Memory for Logical Reasoning with LLMs

Model editing provides a promising mechanism for updating large language models (LLMs) without expensive retraining. Existing approaches, particularly locate-and-edit methods based on least-squares optimization, aim to introduce targeted knowledge changes while preserving pre-trained behavior. In this work, we show that this objective is fundamentally fragile under standard single-edit evaluation protocols. We first develop a unified theoretical framework that characterizes activation-based editing as a constrained intervention on intermediate representations. Within this framework, we demonstrate that least-squares edits cannot, in general, isolate target updates from unrelated activations, giving rise to unavoidable interference that accumulates with successive edits. Crucially, this degradation can remain undetected in single-edit settings when assessed using conventional success and locality metrics. To expose such hidden instabilities, we introduce an uncertainty-based evaluation protocol that combines structured semantic perturbations with uncertainty quantification based on Sampling with Perturbation for UQ. By measuring edit-induced growth in aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty, our method reveals local knowledge conflicts that are invisible to existing benchmarks. Extensive experiments across multiple models, datasets, and editing algorithms show that both least-squares and other parameter-update-based methods consistently increase post-edit uncertainty. Together, our results suggest that current evaluation practices substantially overestimate the reliability of single-edit model editing, and that uncertainty-based diagnostics are necessary for assessing edit stability.

Diagnosing Hidden Instabilities in Model Editing via Uncertainty Quantification

Terminal simulation, framed as a terminal command-level Turing test, is a long-standing problem of symbolic language generation in dialogue and interactive systems. Prior scripted simulators lack the flexibility needed for complex, multi-turn interactions, while LLM-based approaches often misinterpret commands, break output formats, drift from system state, and remain vulnerable to prompt injection. In this work, we propose MANTIS, a terminal simulation framework that improves realism, consistency, and robustness in command-language generation. MANTIS integrates a multi-agent architecture with a filter-based routing model that safely dispatches commands to external tools or an LLM-based agent, enabling support for interactive commands while defending against prompt injection attacks. In addition, we design an agentic file system with history pruning to preserve long-term state consistency. We release three datasets: 28,045 real terminal input-output pairs, a 1,000-session multi-turn interaction dataset, and a 25,849-instance labeled classification dataset. MANTIS outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by more than 9%, achieving over 95% accuracy on multi-turn terminal simulation. The dataset and source code are available at https://github.com/kaiwei666a/MANTIS_Terminal_Simulation

A Multi-Agent Framework for High-Interaction Terminal Simulation

As the post-training of large language models (LLMs) advances from instruction-following to complex reasoning tasks, understanding how different data affect finetuning dynamics remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we present a spectral analysis of layer-wise gradients induced by low/high-quality instruction and reasoning data for LLM post-training. Our analysis reveals that widely-studied metrics for data evaluation, e.g., IFD, InsTag, Difficulty, and Reward, can be explained and unified by spectral properties computed from gradients' singular value decomposition (SVD). Specifically, higher-quality data are usually associated with lower nuclear norms and higher effective ranks. 
Notably, effective rank exhibits better robustness and resolution than nuclear norm in capturing subtle quality differences. For example, reasoning data achieves substantially higher effective ranks than instruction data, implying richer gradient structures on more complex tasks. Our experiments also highlight that models within the same family share similar gradient patterns regardless of their sizes, whereas different model families diverge significantly. Providing a unified view on the effects of data quality across instruction and reasoning data, 
this work illuminates the interplay between data quality and training stability, shedding novel insights into developing better data exploration strategies for post-training.

How Instruction and Reasoning Data shape Post-Training: Data Quality through the Lens of Layer-wise Gradients

Large Language Models demonstrate strong capabilities in single-turn instruction following but suffer from Lost-in-Conversation (LiC), a degradation in performance as information is revealed progressively in multi-turn settings. Motivated by the current progress on Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR), we propose Curriculum Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Accuracy and Abstention Rewards (RLAAR), a framework that encourages models not only to generate correct answers, but also to judge the solvability of questions in the multi-turn conversation setting. Our approach employs a competence-gated curriculum that incrementally increases dialogue difficulty (in terms of instruction shards), stabilizing training while promoting reliability. Using multi-turn, on-policy rollouts and a mixed-reward system, RLAAR teaches models to balance problem-solving with informed abstention, reducing premature answering behaviors that cause LiC. Evaluated on LiC benchmarks, RLAAR significantly mitigates LiC performance decay (62.6% to 75.1%) and improves calibrated abstention rates (33.5% to 73.4%). Together, these results provide a practical recipe for building multi-turn reliable and trustworthy LLMs.

Mitigating Lost in Multi-turn Conversation via Curriculum RL with Verifiable Accuracy and Abstention Rewards

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has emerged as a promising approach for improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models. However, it struggles to effectively balance the trade-off between exploration and exploitation during training, often resulting in suboptimal performance. Motivated by the theoretical insight that changes in entropy are governed by the covariance between token probabilities and their corresponding advantages, we propose a hyperparameter-free, covariance-weighted optimization method that dynamically down-weights extreme token-level updates via a Gaussian kernel. This approach automatically reduces the instability caused by the exploration-exploitation trade-off while preserving informative learning signals. Extensive empirical evaluations show that our approach improves downstream performance across reasoning benchmarks compared with GRPO, and effectively stabilizes entropy as training progresses.

Taming Extreme Tokens: Covariance-Aware GRPO with Gaussian-Kernel Advantage Reweighting

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has led to growing interest in using synthetic data to train future models. However, this creates a self-consuming retraining loop, where models are trained on their own outputs and may cause performance drops and induce emerging biases. In real-world applications, previously deployed LLMs may influence the data they generate, leading to a dynamic system driven by user feedback. For example, if a model continues to underserve users from a group, less query data will be collected from this particular demographic of users. In this study, we introduce the concept of Self-Consuming Performative Loop (SCPL) and investigate the role of synthetic data in shaping bias during these dynamic iterative training processes under controlled performative feedback. This controlled setting is motivated by the inaccessibility of real-world user preference data from dynamic production systems, and enables us to isolate and analyze feedback-driven bias evolution in a principled manner. We focus on two types of loops, including the typical retraining setting and the incremental fine-tuning setting, which is largely underexplored. Through experiments on three real-world tasks, we find that the performative loop increases preference bias and decreases disparate bias. We design a reward-based rejection sampling strategy to mitigate the bias, moving towards more trustworthy self-improving systems. The code is available at \href{https://github.com/UCSC-REAL/SCPL.git}{https://github.com/UCSC-REAL/SCPL.git}.

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