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Audio-language pretraining (ALP) holds promise for learning general-purpose audio representation, yet remains underexplored. 
Crucially, there is no consensus on whether audio–language models can build effective general-purpose audio encoders, nor a systematic understanding of how pretraining objectives behave across diverse tasks and scales.
We identify three key barriers: limited scale of audio-text corpora, limited coverage of audio attributes in existing caption corpora, and lack of systematic exploration and evaluation.
To fill this gap, we present the first principled empirical study of ALP.
We first introduce CaptionStew, a 10.7M caption dataset aggregating open-source audio-text corpora across multiple domains and captioning focuses.
We then conduct the first comprehensive evaluation comparing contrastive and captioning objectives for learning audio representation across speech, music, and environmental sound tasks.
Our results not only demonstrate that ALP yields competitive, transferable representations, but reveal critical trade-offs: contrastive learning offers superior data efficiency, while captioning exhibits better scalability.
Furthermore, we find that the benefits of supervised initialization often diminish at larger scales, challenging common practices.
By grounding these claims in empirical evidence, we establish a viable pathway toward general-purpose audio representation learning, guiding future research.

ACL 2026

 Revisiting Audio-language Pretraining for Learning General-purpose Audio Representation

### 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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NAACL 2025

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

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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. 
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Multimodal LLMs are increasingly deployed as perceptual backbones for autonomous agents in 3D environments, from robotics to virtual worlds. These applications require agents to perceive rapid state changes, attribute actions to the correct entities, and reason about concurrent multi-agent behaviors from a first-person perspective, capabilities that existing benchmarks do not adequately evaluate. We introduce GameplayQA, a framework for evaluating agentic-centric perception and reasoning through video understanding. Specifically, we densely annotate multiplayer 3D gameplay videos at 1.22 labels/second, with time-synced, concurrent captions of states, actions, and events structured around a triadic system of Self, Other Agents, and the World, a natural decomposition for multi-agent environments. From these annotations, we refined 2.4K diagnostic QA pairs organized into three levels of cognitive complexity, accompanied by a structured distractor taxonomy that enables fine-grained analysis of where models hallucinate. Evaluation of frontier MLLMs reveals a substantial gap from human performance, with common failures in temporal and cross-video grounding, agent-role attribution, and handling the decision density of the game. We hope GameplayQA stimulates future research at the intersection of embodied AI, agentic perception, and world modeling.

GameplayQA: A Benchmarking Framework for Decision-Dense POV-Synced Multi-Video Understanding of 3D Virtual Agents

Curriculum learning (CL), which orders training data from easy to hard, has become a popular strategy for improving reasoning in large language models (LLMs). Yet prior work employs disparate difficulty metrics and training setups, leaving open fundamental questions: When does curriculum help? Which direction—forward or reverse—is better? And does the answer depend on what we measure? We address these questions through a unified offline evaluation framework that decomposes curriculum difficulty into five complementary dimensions: Problem Difficulty, Model Surprisal, Confidence Margin, Predictive Uncertainty, and Decision Variability. Through controlled post-training experiments on mathematical reasoning benchmarks with Llama3.1-8B, Mistral-7B, and Gemma3-4B, we find that: (i) no curriculum strategy dominates universally—the relative effectiveness of forward versus reverse CL depends jointly on model capability and task complexity; (ii) even within a single metric, samples at different difficulty levels produce distinct gains depending on task demands; and (iii) Task-aligned curricula focus on shaping the model’s final representations and generalization, whereas inner-state curricula modulate internal states such as confidence and uncertainty. Our findings challenge the notion of a universal curriculum strategy and offer actionable guidance across model and task regimes, with some metrics indicating that prioritizing decision-uncertain samples can further enhance learning outcomes.

What Makes a Good Curriculum? Disentangling the Effects of Data Ordering on LLM Mathematical Reasoning

Reasoning-oriented Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting, yet they remain fundamentally limited by a \emph{blind self-thinking} paradigm: performing extensive internal reasoning even when critical information is missing or ambiguous. We propose Proactive Interactive Reasoning (PIR), a new reasoning paradigm that transforms LLMs from passive solvers into proactive inquirers that interleave reasoning with clarification. Unlike existing search- or tool-based frameworks that primarily address knowledge uncertainty by querying external environments, PIR targets premise- and intent-level uncertainty through direct interaction with the user. PIR is implemented via two core components: (1) an uncertainty-aware supervised fine-tuning procedure that equips models with interactive reasoning capability, and (2) a user-simulator-based policy optimization framework driven by a composite reward that aligns model behavior with user intent. Extensive experiments on mathematical reasoning, code generation, and document editing demonstrate that PIR consistently outperforms strong baselines, achieving up to 32.70% higher accuracy, 22.90% higher pass rate, and 41.36 BLEU improvement, while reducing nearly half of the reasoning computation and unnecessary interaction turns. Further reliability evaluations on factual knowledge, question answering, and missing-premise scenarios confirm the strong generalization and robustness of PIR.

 Reasoning While Asking: Transforming Reasoning Large Language Models from Passive Solvers to Proactive Inquirers

Neural transducers offer an alignment-free framework for speech-to-text modeling, and hierarchical transducer architectures further improve multilingual joint automatic speech recognition (ASR) and speech translation (ST) by stacking a translation-focused encoder on top of an ASR encoder. However, extending hierarchical transducers to multilingual many-to-many settings remains challenging: fully shared models often suffer from negative transfer and unstable target-language generation, while training separate models for each direction is computationally prohibitive. We propose LCMA-SRT (Language-Conditional Mixture-of-Experts Adapters for Speech Recognition and Translation), which augments a hierarchical transducer with language-conditional Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) adapters. A source-conditioned MoE adapter (SRC-MoE) uses source-language embeddings to reduce cross-language interference and improve multilingual ASR. A target-conditioned MoE adapter (TGT-MoE) uses the desired target language to reduce cross-target interference and stabilize target-language generation in many-to-many ST. Experiments on Europarl-ST (9 languages, 72 directions) show that LCMA-SRT improves both ASR and ST within a single joint model, reducing average WER and improving BLEU and COMET over strong hierarchical transducer baselines. We release our code and models at \url{https://github.com/linanjie0820/LCMA-SRT}.

 LCMA-SRT: Language-Conditional Mixture-of-Experts Adapters for Joint Multilingual Speech Recognition and Translation

Time introduces fundamental challenges in model development and deployment: models are usually trained on historical data while deployed on future data where semantic distributions and domain knowledge may evolve. Unfortunately, existing studies either overlook temporal shifts or hardly capture rich shifting patterns of both semantic and knowledge. We develop Knowledge-driven Augmentation and Retrieval for Integrative Temporal Adaptation (KARITA) to capture diverse temporal shifts (e.g., uncertainty and feature shift), construct and integrate rich knowledge sources (e.g., medical ontology like MeSH), and leverage shifting insights for selecting-retrieval augmented learning. We evaluate KARITA on classification tasks across multiple domains, clinical, legal, and scientific corpora, demonstrating consistent improvements across all domain with temporal adaptation. Our results show that knowledge integration can be more critical and effective in temporal augmentation and learning.

 Knowledge-driven Augmentation and Retrieval for Integrative Temporal Adaptation

Reward Models (RMs) are critical components in the Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) pipeline, directly determining the alignment quality of Large Language Models (LLMs). Recently, Generative Reward Models (GRMs) have emerged as a superior paradigm, offering higher interpretability and stronger generalization than traditional scalar RMs. However, existing methods for GRMs focus primarily on outcome-level supervision, neglecting analytical process quality, which constrains their potential. To address this, we propose ReflectRM, a novel GRM that leverages self-reflection to assess analytical quality and enhance preference modeling. ReflectRM is trained under a unified generative framework for joint modeling of response preference and analysis preference. During inference, we use its self-reflection capability to identify the most reliable analysis, from which the final preference prediction is derived. Experiments across four benchmarks show that ReflectRM consistently improves performance, achieving an average accuracy gain of +3.7 on Qwen3-4B. Further experiments confirm that response preference and analysis preference are mutually reinforcing. Notably, ReflectRM substantially mitigates positional bias, yielding +10.2 improvement compared with leading GRMs and establishing itself as a more stable evaluator. Our code is available at https://github.com/yuliangCarmelo/ReflectRM.

ReflectRM: Boosting Generative Reward Models via Self-Reflection within a Unified Judgment Framework

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit enhanced capabilities by Chain-of-Thought reasoning. However, the extended reasoning sequences introduce significant GPU memory overhead due to increased key-value (KV) cache. Existing KV cache compression methods mitigate memory bottlenecks but struggle in long reasoning tasks. In this paper, we analyze attention patterns in reasoning tasks and reveal a **Token Importance Recurrence** phenomenon: a large proportion of tokens regain high attention after multiple decoding steps, which is failed to capture by existing works and may lead to unpredictable eviction on such periodically critical tokens. To address this, we propose **LazyEviction**, an observation window-based lagged eviction framework retaining latent recurring tokens by prioritized eviction based on tokens' recurrence patterns. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LazyEviction reduces KV cache by 50%~70% while maintaining comparable accuracy, outperforming existing KV cache baselines. Our implementation code can be found at https://github.com/Halo-949/LazyEviction.

LazyEviction: Lagged KV Eviction with Attention Pattern Observation for Efficient Long Reasoning

Surprisal theory hypothesizes that the difficulty of human sentence processing increases linearly with surprisal, the negative log-probability of a word given its context. Computational psycholinguistics has tested this hypothesis using language models (LMs) as proxies for human prediction. While surprisal derived from recent neural LMs generally captures human processing difficulty on naturalistic corpora that predominantly consist of simple sentences, it severely underestimates processing difficulty on sentences that require syntactic disambiguation (garden-path effects). This leads to the claim that the processing difficulty of such sentences cannot be reduced to surprisal, although it remains possible that neural LMs simply differ from humans in next-word prediction. In this paper, we investigate whether it is truly impossible to construct a neural LM that can explain garden-path effects via surprisal. Specifically, instead of evaluating off-the-shelf neural LMs, we fine-tune these LMs on garden-path sentences so as to better align surprisal-based reading-time estimates with actual human reading times. Our results show that fine-tuned LMs do not overfit and successfully capture human reading slowdowns on held-out garden-path items; they even improve predictive power for human reading times on naturalistic corpora and preserve their general LM capabilities. These results provide an existence proof for a neural LM that can explain both garden-path effects and naturalistic reading times via surprisal, but also raise a theoretical question: what kind of evidence can truly falsify surprisal theory?

An Existence Proof for Neural Language Models That Can Explain Garden-Path Effects via Surprisal

Large language model (LLM) agents excel at multi-step tasks yet frequently exhibit \textit{Action Boundary Blindness}---the inability to correctly determine action granularity, scope, and completeness. Grounded in Event Segmentation Theory from cognitive science, we formalize three violation types: \textit{granularity confusion}, \textit{scope creep}, and \textit{boundary ambiguity}. We propose four automatic metrics---Action Boundary Score (ABS), Granularity Alignment Rate (GAR), Scope Violation Rate (SVR), and Boundary-Aware Success Rate (BASR)---requiring no human annotation. Experiments on 1,655 tasks across six benchmarks ($\tau$-bench, WebArena, ALFWorld, TheAgentCompany, OSWorld) with seven LLMs reveal that: (1) the best model achieves only 0.424 ABS; (2) using a multi-label attribution framework validated by inter-annotator agreement ($\kappa = 0.78$), boundary blindness is the primary failure mode in 37.2\% of failures (25.8\% as sole cause; 55.9\% total involvement including contributing factors); (3) under-action dominates at 48.4\%; (4) BASR is consistently $\sim$4 points lower than traditional success rate, exposing ``lucky successes.'' Critically, Explicit Boundary Prompting (EBP) improves ABS by 0.08--0.13 across all models, demonstrating that boundary blindness is better characterized as an \textit{elicitation gap} rather than a fundamental capability limitation---LLMs possess latent boundary perception not activated by default. This finding has implications for alignment and instruction tuning. We validate metrics through state-based cross-validation and human audit, estimating $\sim$22\% false positive rate from valid alternative paths, with model rankings remaining stable (Spearman $\rho = 1.0$).

Action Boundary Blindness: When LLM Agents Cannot Tell Where One Action Ends and Another Begins

Recent Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) excel at complex reasoning tasks but often suffer from overthinking, generating overly long and redundant reasoning trajectories. To explore its essence, our empirical analysis reveals that LRMs are primarily limited to recognizing task properties (i.e., difficulty levels) like humans before solving the problem, leading to a one-size-fits-all reasoning strategy. This observation motivates a fundamental question: Can we explicitly bootstrap such ability to alleviate overthinking in LRMs? To this end, we propose Think-How-to-Think (TH2T), a novel two-stage fine-tuning strategy that progressively inspires LRMs' difficulty cognition and redundancy cognition of LRMs. Specifically, we first inject Difficulty Dypnosis into output prefixes as cues for global, prospective reasoning strategy selection, stimulating the model's sharper sensitivity to task complexity and adaptive control of reasoning depth. Then, we incorporate Redundancy Hypnosis into in-progress reasoning steps, which serve as local, retrospective signals for behavior correction by identifying and eliminating superfluous reasoning detours. Experiments across 7B/14B/32B models demonstrate that TH2T significantly reduces inference costs by over 70% on easy tasks and 40% on complex ones without compromising performance. The resultant models exhibit a nascent ability for difficulty-aware reasoning, effectively mitigating behaviors like excessive reflection and looping, thereby paving the way for more cognitively efficient LRMs.

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