United States

Scaling laws have enabled predictable compute allocation for pre-training and for RL in reasoning tasks. However, research on retrieval reinforcement generation (RAG) remains insufficient and there is a lack of fundamental understanding of the interaction between retrieval quality and reinforcement learning computation. We present the first systematic study of RL scaling for RAG across three knowledge-intensive benchmarks. We introduce the Retrieval Bottleneck Hypothesis and derive sigmoidal scaling laws showing that retrieval quality, not RL compute, determines the asymptotic performance ceiling. Our analysis reveals three principles: (1) retrieval quality bounds achievable performance, with improving retrieval yielding larger gains than algorithmic innovations; (2) design choices (training objectives, rewards, off-policy methods) primarily modulate compute efficiency, with secondary effects on the ceiling that are substantially smaller than retrieval quality improvements; and (3) stable configurations enable extrapolation with 3.1% error at 4x compute. We further uncover RAG-specific dynamics: optimal document count increases with training, and RL algorithm effectiveness depends critically on retrieval quality. These insights yield RAG-ScaleRL, achieving strong performance on knowledge-intensive benchmarks while providing the predictable scaling long available for pre-training but previously absent in RAG-RL.

ACL 2026

 The Retrieval Bottleneck: Scaling Laws for Reinforcement Learning in RAG

We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-26 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.

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AAAI 2026

We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

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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.

Summarizing deeply nested discussion threads requires handling interleaved replies, quotes, and overlapping topics, which standard LLM summarizers struggle to capture reliably. We introduce $ThreadSumm$, a multi-stage LLM framework that treats thread summarization as a hierarchical reasoning problem over explicit aspect and content unit representations. Our method first performs content planning via LLM-based extraction of discourse aspects and Atomic Content Units, then applies sentence ordering to construct thread-aware sequences that surface multiple viewpoints rather than a single linear strand. On top of these interpretable units, $ThreadSumm$ employs a Tree of Thoughts search that generates and scores multiple paragraph candidates, jointly optimizing coherence and coverage within a unified search space. With this multi-proposal and iterative refinement design, we show improved performance in generating logically structured summaries compared to existing baselines, while achieving higher aspect retention and opinion coverage in nested discussions.

ThreadSumm: Summarization of Nested Discourse Threads Using Tree of Thoughts

LLMs are ubiquitous in modern NLP, and while their applicability extends to texts produced for democratic activities such as online deliberations or large-scale citizen consultations, ethical questions have been raised for their usage as analysis tools. We continue this line of research with two main goals: (a) to develop resources that can help standardize citizen contributions in public forums at the \textbf{pragmatic level}, and make them easier to use in topic modeling and political analysis; (b) to study how well this standardization can reliably be performed by small, open-weights LLMs, \emph{i.e.} models that can be run locally and transparently with limited resources. Accordingly, we introduce \textbf{Corpus Clarification} as a preprocessing framework for large-scale consultation data that transforms noisy, multi-topic contributions into structured, self-contained argumentative units ready for downstream analysis. We present \textbf{GDN-CC}, a manually-curated dataset of 1,231 contributions to the French \textit{Grand Débat National}, comprising 2,285 argumentative units annotated for argumentative structure and manually clarified. 
We then show that finetuned Small Language Models match or outperform LLMs on reproducing these annotations, and measure their usability for an opinion clustering task. We finally release \textbf{GDN-CC-large}, an automatically annotated corpus of 240k contributions, the largest annotated democratic consultation dataset to date.

The GDN-CC Dataset: Automatic Corpus Clarification for AI-enhanced Democratic Citizen Consultations

Speculative Decoding has emerged as a popular technique for accelerating inference in Large Language Models. However, most existing approaches yield only modest improvements in production serving systems. Methods that achieve substantial speedups typically rely on an additional trained draft model or auxiliary model components, increasing deployment and maintenance complexity. This added complexity reduces flexibility, particularly when serving workloads shift to tasks, domains, or languages that are not well represented in the draft model’s training data.

We introduce Simply-Scalable Speculative Decoding (SSSD), a training-free method that combines lightweight n-gram matching with hardware-aware speculation. Relative to standard autoregressive decoding, SSSD reduces latency by up to 2.9×. It achieves performance on par with leading training-based approaches across a broad range of benchmarks, while requiring substantially lower adoption effort---no data preparation, training or tuning are needed---and exhibiting superior robustness under language and domain shift, as well as in long-context settings.

 SSSD: Simply-Scalable Speculative Decoding

Key-Value (KV) cache compression techniques have improved the efficiency of long-context summarization in Large Language Models (LLMs), but their impact on model hallucination remains underexplored. In this paper, we present the first systematic study of how KV cache compression affects hallucination in long-context summarization, demonstrating that aggressive compression can increase hallucination scores by up to 3.36× compared to the baseline. To mitigate this issue, we propose HalluKV, a decoding-phase strategy that selectively removes generated KV pairs from retrieval heads responsible for retrieving critical information from source context, thereby anchoring their attention on the preserved source information. Our approach maintains computational efficiency while significantly reducing hallucination across multiple models and datasets, achieving up to 5.48 average point reductions on Llama-3-8B-Instruct, enabling more trustworthy long-context summarization.

Anchoring the Cache: Mitigating Contextual Hallucination in KV-Compressed Long-Context Summarization

Test-time scaling evaluates reasoning LLMs by sampling multiple outputs per prompt, but ranking models in this regime remains underexplored. We formalize dense benchmark ranking under test-time scaling and introduce Scorio, a library that implements statistical ranking methods such as paired-comparison models, item response theory (IRT) models, voting rules, and graph- and spectral-based methods. Across 20 reasoning models on four Olympiad-style math benchmarks (AIME'24, AIME'25, HMMT'25, and BrUMO'25; up to N = 80 trials), most full-trial rankings agree closely with the Bayesian gold standard Bayes_𝒰@80 (mean Kendall's τ_b = 0.93–0.95), and 19–34 methods recover exactly the same ordering. In the single-trial regime, the best methods reach τ_b ≈ 0.86.

Using greedy decoding as an empirical prior (Bayes_R₀@N) reduces variance at N = 1 by 16–52%, but can bias rankings when greedy and stochastic sampling disagree. These results identify reliable ranking methods for both high- and low-budget test-time scaling. We release Scorio as an open-source library at https://github.com/mohsenhariri/scorio.

Ranking Reasoning LLMs under Test-Time Scaling

The growing demand for automated writing assistance in diverse academic domains highlights the need for robust Chinese Grammatical Error Correction (CGEC) systems that can adapt across disciplines. However, existing CGEC research largely lacks dedicated benchmarks for multi-disciplinary academic writing, overlooking continual learning (CL) as a promising solution to handle domain-specific linguistic variation and prevent catastrophic forgetting. To fill this crucial gap, we introduce CL$^2$GEC, the first Continual Learning benchmark for Chinese Literature Grammatical Error Correction, designed to evaluate adaptive CGEC across multiple academic fields. Our benchmark includes 10,000 human-annotated sentences spanning 10 disciplines, each exhibiting distinct linguistic styles and error patterns. CL$^2$GEC focuses on evaluating grammatical error correction in a continual learning setting, simulating sequential exposure to diverse academic disciplines to reflect real-world editorial dynamics. We evaluate large language models under sequential tuning, parameter-efficient adaptation, and four representative CL algorithms, using both standard GEC metrics and continual learning metrics adapted to task-level variation. Experimental results reveal that regularization-based methods mitigate forgetting more effectively than replay-based or naive sequential approaches. Our benchmark provides a rigorous foundation for future research in adaptive grammatical error correction across diverse academic domains.

CL$^2$GEC: A Multi-Discipline Benchmark for Continual Learning in Chinese Literature Grammatical Error Correction

Multi-turn Text-to-SQL aims to translate a user’s conversational utterances into executable SQL while preserving dialogue coherence and grounding to the target schema. However, most existing systems only regard this task as a simple text translation task and follow a short-horizon paradigm, generating a query per turn without execution, explicit verification, and refinement, which leads to non-executable or incoherent outputs. We present MTSQL-R1, an agentic training framework for long-horizon multi-turn Text-to-SQL. We cast the task as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) in which an agent interacts with (i) a database for execution feedback and (ii) a persistent dialogue memory for coherence verification, performing an iterative propose->execute->verify->refine cycle until all checks pass. Experiments on CoSQL and SParC demonstrate that MTSQL-R1 consistently outperforms strong baselines, highlighting the importance of environment-driven verification and memory-guided refinement for conversational semantic parsing. Full recipes (including code, trained models, reasoning trajectories, etc.) will be released upon acceptance to contribute to community research.

 MTSQL-R1: Towards Long-Horizon Multi-Turn Text-to-SQL via Agentic Training

Large language model (LLM) agents rely on external tools to solve complex tasks, but real-world toolsets often contain redundant tools with overlapping names and descriptions, introducing ambiguity and reducing selection accuracy. LLMs also face strict input context limits, preventing efficient consideration of large toolsets. To address these challenges, we propose ToolScope, which includes: (1) ToolScopeMerger with Auto-Correction to automatically audit and fix tool merges, reducing redundancy, and (2) ToolScopeRetriever to rank and select only the most relevant tools for each query, compressing toolsets to fit within context limits without sacrificing accuracy. Evaluations on three state-of-the-art LLMs and three open-source tool-use benchmarks show gains of 8.38% to 38.6% in tool selection accuracy, demonstrating ToolScope’s effectiveness in enhancing LLM tool use.

ToolScope: Enhancing LLM Agent Tool Use through Tool Merging and Context-Aware Filtering

Narrative flow emerges from the interplay between memory and expectation, shaping how stories are both produced and understood. To operationalize this construct, Sap et al. (2022) propose sequentiality, a language-model–based measure of sentence-level predictability, and report that imagined stories flow better than recalled ones. We conduct a large-scale replication across multiple language models, examine how modeling choices shape the original findings, and test generalization beyond crowdworker data using passages from published fiction and narrative non-fiction. Although the original contrast replicates under their initial formulation, it diminishes substantially under alternative specifications, suggesting that it reflects properties of the measurement setup rather than a stable feature of narrative flow. By contrast, fiction does appear to exhibit a robust sequentiality advantage over reality-bound genres under a minimal context-only formulation. However, mixed-effects analyses indicate that this advantage is not reducible to standard coherence measures, underscoring the need for further theoretical and empirical grounding of narrative flow.

Fiction Flows: A Replication and Reinterpretation of Narrative Sequentiality

Propaganda is a widely used approach for shaping public opinion and disseminating misinformation in news media. While it has recently gained significant attention within the NLP community, research on fine grained propaganda detection remains heavily concentrated in high resource languages. To bridge this gap, we introduce KinyaProp, the first fine-grained propaganda dataset of its kind for Kinyarwanda and, to our knowledge, the first such resource created for a Bantu language. Using this dataset, we evaluate whether state-of-the-art LLMs can function as reliable annotators in a genuinely low resource and culturally grounded setting. Our results show that current multilingual LLMs do not reliably approximate human annotation behavior. Instead, they behave as conservative annotators whose performance is largely limited to lexically explicit cues, substantially under-identifying propaganda and exhibiting extremely low and unstable performance on discourse-level techniques. Our findings highlight an important limitation of recent successes in LLM based annotation reported for high resource languages, demonstrating that such results do not readily transfer to low resource settings, where scalable annotation would be most valuable. We release KinyaProp to support future research on fine grained propaganda detection and to enable more robust evaluation of multilingual models in underrepresented languages.

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