United States

To sustain coherent long-term interactions, Large Language Model (LLM) agents must navigate the tension between acquiring new information and retaining prior knowledge. Current unified stream-based memory systems facilitate context updates but remain vulnerable to interference from transient noise. Conversely, discrete structured memory architectures provide robust knowledge retention but often struggle to adapt to fluid narrative evolution. To address this, we propose GAM, a hierarchical Graph-based Agentic Memory framework that explicitly decouples memory encoding from consolidation to effectively resolve the conflict between rapid context perception and stable knowledge retention. By isolating ongoing dialogue in a event progression graph and integrating it into a topic associative network only upon semantic shifts, our approach minimizes interference while preserving long-term consistency. Additionally, we introduce a Graph-guided, Multi-factor Retrieval strategy to enhance context precision. Experiments on LoCoMo and LongDialQA benchmarks indicate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both reasoning accuracy and computational efficiency.

ACL 2026

GAM: Hierarchical Graph-based Agentic Memory for LLM Agents

#### *Message from the General Chair, Aline Villavicencio*
I’m delighted and honoured to welcome you to the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL 2026), taking place in the beautiful city of Rabat, in Morocco, in March 24-29, 2026. EACL is the flagship European conference of the Association and EACL 2026 proudly continues our field’s tradition of excellence in scholarship, innovation, and inclusivity. I am deeply grateful to the many volunteers whose dedication, generosity, and tireless efforts have made this conference possible.
For the first time EACL is being hosted in the African continent. This is an important milestone for our community, and we are grateful to our Moroccan hosts for enabling this historic moment by bringing this edition of EACL to Rabat. We are also delighted that the Second Arabic NLP School is co-located with EACL. We hope attendees enjoy this wonderful opportunity to strengthen ties with the Computational Linguistics communities across the African continent. *[Read full message](https://drive.google.com/file/d/14NlmHvwM6fPJuMmOvVh7K0vtQbEyv3SZ/view?usp=sharing)*<br><br>

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EACL 2026

Welcome to the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL). EACL 2026 will be held in Rabat, Morocco, from March 24–29, 2026. 

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. <br>
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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.

Neologisms, emerging terms in meaning or form, can serve as new vehicles for toxic expression, like "田园女" ("country girl") as a stigmatizing label targeting feminism. Such toxic neologisms appear benign but have evolved into toxic usage in public consensus, posing challenges to moderation systems and remaining underexplored. In this paper, we investigate how to detect implicit toxicity expressed via neologisms. We first propose a taxonomy that captures the origins and consensus-verification criteria of toxic neologisms, followed by the construction of a lexicon spanning widely observed risk categories. To capture toxicity grounded in public consensus, we introduce **SeTox**, a search-augmented framework that enables static large language models (LLMs) to incorporate real-time web context for neologism toxicity detection. Experiments show that **SeTox**, even with 3B-scale models, outperforms recent large-scale models, demonstrating its scalability to incorporate real-world knowledge for toxic neologism detection. **Disclaimer**: this paper has offensive contents that may be disturbing to some readers.

New Terms, New Toxicity: Consensus-based Chinese Neologism Toxicity Detection via Search-Augmented LLMs

Document-level relation extraction (DocRE) aims to determine which relations hold between a given entity pair within a document. As a multi-label classification task, the most commonly adopted paradigm introduces a learnable threshold to distinguish positive and negative classes for an entity pair. Under this paradigm, existing losses decouple the optimization into independent positive and negative losses, which interact solely with a shared threshold. This leads to two inherent limitations: (*i*) threshold instability caused by conflicting gradient updates from the decoupled losses; and (*ii*) optimization bias exacerbated by the severe imbalance between limited positive samples and abundant negative samples inherent in DocRE, which makes the model more likely to predict that no relation exists.

To address these issues, we propose the **A**daptive-**T**hreshold **G**lobal **L**oss (ATGL). Unlike prior work, ATGL integrates positive, negative, and threshold optimization into a unified logit space and explicitly enforces ranking constraints on their contributions to the objective. Furthermore, ATGL incorporates an imbalance-aware optimization mechanism, thereby effectively addressing the severe class imbalance in DocRE. Our ATGL serves as a general optimization objective that can be readily applied to different DocRE models. Experiments on four datasets show that ATGL outperforms other DocRE losses and achieves state-of-the-art results, while consistently improving the performance of existing DocRE models. Code is available at https://github.com/xhm-code/ATGL.

ATGL: An Adaptive-Threshold Global Loss for Document-level Relation Extraction

Emergency departments (ED) rely on the Emergency Severity Index (ESI) to assess patient acuity and prioritize care, a process that is largely driven by clinical triage text. Despite recent progress in automated ESI prediction, two fundamental challenges remain: the scarcity of high-quality triage text data due to privacy and regulatory constraints and the lack of a clinically grounded triage framework capable of explicitly capturing the multidimensional structure of triage reasoning. To address these challenges, we draw inspiration from the clinically grounded SOAP paradigm, in which SOAP refers to Subjective, Objective, Assessment, and Plan and captures four complementary aspects of clinical reasoning. Building on this paradigm, we propose SOAPTriage, a SOAP-guided multi-view clinical text modeling framework for automated ESI prediction. To mitigate data scarcity, SOAPTriage introduces a Clinical Note Augmentation (CNA) module that generates natural-language triage notes from structured ED records, resulting in 15,393 augmented clinical notes derived from a real-world dataset. To incorporate clinical structure, SOAPTriage employs a SOAP-Guided Encoding (SGE) module that models patient conditions from four complementary SOAP perspectives, together with an adaptive SOAP-Aware Aggregation and Inference (SAAI) module that performs multi-view reasoning to infer ESI levels. Extensive experiments show that SOAPTriage consistently outperforms strong prompting-based, multi-agent, and encoder-based baselines, demonstrating the effectiveness of SOAP-guided multi-view clinical text modeling for automated emergency triage.

SOAPTriage: SOAP-Guided Multi-View Clinical Text Modeling Framework for Automated ESI Prediction

Scientific ideation aims to propose novel solutions within a given scientific context. Existing LLM-based agentic approaches emulate human research workflows, yet inadequately model scientific reasoning, resulting in surface-level conceptual recombinations that lack technical depth and scientific grounding. To address this issue, we propose $\textbf{MoRI}$ ($\textbf{Mo}$tivation-grounded $\textbf{R}$easoning for Scientific $\textbf{I}$deation), a framework that enables LLMs to explicitly learn the reasoning process from research motivations to methodologies. The base LLM is initialized via supervised fine-tuning to generate a research motivation from a given context, and is subsequently trained under a composite reinforcement learning reward that approximates scientific rigor: (1) entropy-aware information gain encourages the model to uncover and elaborate high-complexity technical details grounded in ground-truth methodologies, and (2) contrastive semantic gain constrains the reasoning trajectory to remain conceptually aligned with scientifically valid solutions. Empirical results show that MoRI consistently outperforms strong commercial LLMs and complex agentic baselines across multiple dimensions, including novelty, technical rigor, and feasibility. The code is available on \href{https://github.com/ECNU-Text-Computing/IdeaGeneration}{GitHub}.

MoRI: Learning Motivation-Grounded Reasoning for Scientific Ideation in Large Language Models

Large language model (LLM) agents have exhibited strong problem-solving competence across domains like research and coding. Yet, it remains underexplored whether LLM agents can tackle compounding real-world problems that require a diverse set of tools to complete. 
Given a broad, heterogeneous tool repository, LLM agents must not only select appropriate tools based on task planning analysis but also strategically schedule the execution order to ensure efficiency. This paper introduces TPS-Bench to benchmark the ability of LLM agents in solving such problems that demand Tool Planning and Scheduling. TPS-Bench collects 200 compounding tasks of two difficulty levels, based on a tool repository containing hundreds of model context protocol (MCP) tools. In particular, each task is composed of multiple subtasks, such as web search, map navigation, calendar checking, etc., and each subtask can be completed by a basic tool. Our evaluation emphasizes both task completion rate and efficiency. The empirical studies on popular closed-source and open-source LLMs indicate that most models can perform reasonable tool planning, but differ in scheduling. For example, GLM-4.5 achieves an outperforming task completion rate of 64.72% with extensive sequential tool calls, hence suffering from significantly long execution time. By contrast, GPT-4o prioritizes parallel tool calls but achieves only a 45.08% completion rate. Considering reinforcement learning (RL) can be a viable way to improve the scheduling efficiency without compromising performance, we perform an initial study on Qwen3-1.7B and witness a 14% reduction in execution time alongside a 6% gain in task completion rate based on only 597 RL training samples.

TPS-Bench: Evaluating AI Agents’ Tool Planning & Scheduling Abilities in Compounding Tasks

Large language models (LLMs) used for multiple-choice and pairwise evaluation tasks often exhibit selection bias due to non-semantic factors like option positions and label symbols. Existing inference-time debiasing is costly and may harm reasoning, while pointwise training ignores that the same question should yield consistent answers across permutations. To address this issue, we propose Permutation-Aware Group Relative Policy Optimization (PA-GRPO), which mitigates selection bias by enforcing permutation-consistent semantic reasoning. PA-GRPO constructs a permutation group for each instance by generating multiple candidate permutations, and optimizes the model using two complementary mechanisms: (1) cross-permutation advantage, which computes advantages relative to the mean reward over all permutations of the same instance, and (2) consistency-aware reward, which encourages the model to produce consistent decisions across different permutations. Experimental results demonstrate that PA-GRPO outperforms strong baselines across seven benchmarks, substantially reducing selection bias while maintaining high overall performance. The code is available on github (https://github.com/ECNU-Text-Computing/PA-GRPO).

Mitigating Selection Bias in Large Language Models via Permutation-Aware GRPO

Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) for Visual Question Answering (VQA) often suffer from dual limitations: knowledge hallucination and insufficient fine-grained visual perception. Crucially, we identify that commonsense graphs and scene graphs provide precisely complementary solutions to these respective deficiencies by providing rich external knowledge and capturing fine-grained visual details. However, prior works typically treat them in isolation, overlooking their synergistic potential. To bridge this gap, we propose KG-ViP, a unified framework that empowers MLLMs by fusing scene graphs and commonsense graphs. The core of the KG-ViP framework is a novel retrieval-and-fusion pipeline that utilizes the query as a semantic bridge to progressively integrate both graphs, synthesizing a unified structured context that facilitates reliable multi-modal reasoning. Extensive experiments on FVQA 2.0+ and MVQA benchmarks demonstrate that KG-ViP significantly outperforms existing VQA methods.

KG-ViP: Bridging Knowledge Grounding and Visual Perception in Multi-modal LLMs for Visual Question Answering

Recent advancements in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have revolutionized general visual understanding. However, their application in the food domain remains constrained by benchmarks that rely on coarse-grained categories, single-view imagery, and inaccurate metadata. To bridge this gap, we introduce DiningBench, a hierarchical, multi-view benchmark designed to evaluate VLMs across three levels of cognitive complexity: Fine-Grained Classification, Nutrition Estimation, and Visual Question Answering. Unlike previous datasets, DiningBench comprises 3,021 distinct dishes with an average of 5.27 images per entry, incorporating fine-grained "hard" negatives from identical menus and rigorous, verification-based nutritional data. We conduct an extensive evaluation of 29 state-of-the-art open-source and proprietary models. Our experiments reveal that while current VLMs excel at general reasoning, they struggle significantly with fine-grained visual discrimination and precise nutritional reasoning. Furthermore, we systematically investigate the impact of multi-view inputs and Chain-of-Thought reasoning, identifying five primary failure modes. DiningBench serves as a challenging testbed to drive the next generation of food-centric VLM research. All codes are released in https://github.com/meituan/DiningBench.

DiningBench: A Hierarchical Multi-view Benchmark for Perception and Reasoning in the Dietary Domain

Current RLHF methods such as PPO and DPO typically reduce human preferences to binary labels, which are costly to obtain and too coarse to reflect individual variation. We observe that expressions of satisfaction and dissatisfaction follow stable linguistic patterns across users, indicating that more informative supervisory signals can be extracted from free-form feedback. Building on this insight, we introduce Adaptive Reward-Following (ARF), which converts natural feedback into continuous preference trajectories and optimizes them using the novel TraceBias algorithm. Across diverse LLMs and preference domains, ARF consistently outperforms PPO and DPO, improving alignment by up to 7.6%. Our results demonstrate that continuous reward modeling provides a scalable path toward personalized and theoretically grounded RLHF.

ARF-RLHF: Adaptive Reward-Following for RLHF through Emotion-Driven Self-Supervision and Trace-Biased Dynamic Optimization

Deploying large language models (LLMs) in resource-constrained environments is hindered by heavy computational and memory requirements. We present LBLLM, a lightweight binarization framework that achieves effective W(1+1)A4 quantization through a novel three-stage quantization strategy. The framework proceeds as follows: (1) initialize a high-quality quantized model via PTQ; (2) quantize binarized weights, group-wise bitmaps, and quantization parameters through layer-wise distillation while keeping activations in full precision; and (3) training learnable activation quantization factors to dynamically quantize activations to 4 bits. This decoupled design mitigates interference between weight and activation quantization, yielding greater training stability and better inference accuracy. LBLLM, trained only using 0.016B tokens with a single GPU, surpasses existing state-of-the-art binarization methods on W2A4 quantization settings across tasks of language modeling, commonsense QA, and language understanding. These results demonstrate that extreme low-bit quantization of LLMs can be both practical and highly effective without introducing any extra high-precision channels or rotational matrices commonly used in recent PTQ-based works, offering a promising path toward efficient LLM deployment in resource-limited situations.

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New Terms, New Toxicity: Consensus-based Chinese Neologism Toxicity Detection via Search-Augmented LLMs

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