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Empathetic speech dialogue requires not only understanding linguistic content but also perceiving rich paralinguistic information such as prosody, tone, and emotional intensity for affective understandings. Existing speech-to-speech large language models either rely on ASR transcription or use encoders to extract latent representations, often weakening affective information and contextual coherence in multi-turn dialogues. To address this, we propose \textbf{ES4R}, a framework for speech-based empathetic response generation. Our core innovation lies in explicitly modeling structured affective context before speech encoding, rather than relying on implicit learning by the encoder or explicit emotion supervision. Specifically, we introduce a dual-level attention mechanism to capture turn-level affective states and dialogue-level affective dynamics. The resulting affective representations are then integrated with textual semantics through speech-guided cross-modal attention to generate empathetic responses. For speech output, we employ energy-based strategy selection and style fusion to achieve empathetic speech synthesis. ES4R consistently outperforms strong baselines in both automatic and human evaluations and remains robust across different Large Language Model (LLM) backbones. Code: https://github.com/Bean0901/ES4R.

ACL 2026

ES4R: Speech Encoding Based on Prepositive Affective Modeling for Empathetic Response Generation

## 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) are designed for discrete tokens, yet they operate in a continuous embedding space. Recent context compression methods exploit this property by encoding text into dense vectors for frozen LLM decoding. However, a key question remains unanswered: how does a frozen LLM interpret continuous vectors that encode complex semantics? We investigate this through controlled reconstruction experiments. Our analysis reveals a critical geometric property: compression encoders learn to produce vectors with L2 norms two orders of magnitude higher than standard embeddings. We show that this high-norm signal is causally necessary for the frozen LLM to decode compressed information. Based on this finding, we propose a landmark-based compression framework for long contexts. Our encoder uses bidirectional attention over landmark tokens. This design captures global dependencies and avoids semantic fragmentation from segment-based methods. Experiments on text reconstruction and four QA benchmarks validate our approach. At 4x and 16x compression ratios, our method outperforms prior soft compression baselines.

Frozen LLMs are Native Decoders for High-Norm Semantic Vectors

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have significantly improved code-generation capabilities, particularly through retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for private libraries. While RAG leverages API documentation to address the scarcity of private code corpora, its performance critically depends on the quality of retrieved examples. Existing approaches often overlook the intrinsic characteristics of these examples, particularly how factors such as complexity, readability, and correctness impact their effectiveness. In this study, we systematically investigate these three critical aspects—complexity, readability, and correctness—and find that optimal examples should exhibit moderate complexity, semantic correctness, and step-by-step execution patterns. Based on these findings, we propose ComboPrompt, a novel example enhancement method that strategically combines existing API examples to improve complexity, refines code structure for readability, and incorporates automated validation ensuring correctness. Extensive evaluations across five private library benchmarks and different LLMs demonstrate that ComboPrompt achieves up to 22% accuracy improvement over baseline approaches. Code is available at [Anonymous Github](https://github.com/FireAndWin/ComboPrompt_ExampleQualityMatters).

Example Quality Matters: Multi-Aspects Example Augmentation for Private Library Programming

Graph-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation (GraphRAG) advances flat document retrieval by structuring knowledge as relational graphs, enabling more coherent and effective reasoning. However, applying it to specific domains like legal reasoning faces critical challenges. (i) Legal corpora are heterogeneous, containing multi-granular knowledge from cases, articles and interpretations. A flat knowledge graph cannot adequately differentiate between factual details, applied rules, and abstract principles, limiting accurate retrieval. (ii) Reliable legal judgment demands transparent, evidence-based reasoning. Traditional RAG passes retrieved context directly to an LLM without verification, resulting in opaque, error-prone reasoning. To this end, we propose LegalGraphRAG, a framework designed for reliable legal reasoning. Our approach introduces two core components: a hierarchical legal graph that hierarchically organizes legal sources to enable retrieval at appropriate abstraction levels, and a multi-agent system for reliable legal reasoning, where a Researcher retrieves candidate evidence, an Auditor rigorously verifies its validity against source documents, and an Adjudicator synthesizes the set of verified evidence to render a final judgment. Extensive experiments show that LegalGraphRAG achieves the state-of-the-art performance, outperforming existing GraphRAG baselines in accurate and trustworthy legal analysis. Our code, datasets and implementation details are available at https://github.com/XMUDeepLIT/LegalGraphRAG.

LegalGraphRAG: Multi-Agent Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Reliable Legal Reasoning

Post-training quantization has emerged as a widely adopted technique for compressing and accelerating the inference of Large Language Models (LLMs). The primary challenges in LLMs quantization stem from activation outliers, which significantly degrade model performance especially at lower bit precision. While recent approaches attempt to mitigate outliers through linear transformations across feature dimensions, our analysis reveals that the transformed weights and activations still exhibit persistent outlier patterns with concentrated magnitude distributions. In this paper, we first model the mathematical relationship between quantization error and outliers, and then introduce a new metric Flatness to quantify the distribution of outliers. Based on this, we derive the theoretical optimal solution with respect to Flatness. Building on these insights, we propose Bidirectional Diagonal Quantization (BDQ), a novel post-training quantization framework that effectively disperses outlier patterns through optimized matrix transformations. BDQ strategically distributes outlier magnitudes across matrix dimensions via learned diagonal operations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BDQ establishes a new quantization benchmark. It achieves less than 1% accuracy drop in W4A4 quantization on the LLaMA-3-8B model. In the more challenging W2A4KV16 experiment, compared to state-of-the-art approaches, BDQ reduces the performance gap by 39.1% on the DeepSeek-R1-Distill-LLaMA-70B model.

Theory-optimal Quantization Based on Flatness

Temporal knowledge graph (TKG) forecasting requires predicting future facts by jointly modeling structural dependencies within each snapshot and temporal evolution across snapshots. However, most existing methods are stateless: they recompute entity representations at each timestamp from a limited query window, leading to episodic amnesia and rapid decay of long-term dependencies. To address this limitation, we propose Entity State Tuning (EST), an encoder-agnostic framework that endows TKG forecasters with persistent and continuously evolving entity states. EST maintains a global state buffer and progressively aligns structural evidence with sequential signals via a closed-loop design. Specifically, a topology-aware state perceiver first injects entity-state priors into structural encoding. Then, a unified temporal context module aggregates the state-enhanced events with a pluggable sequence backbone. Subsequently, a dual-track evolution mechanism writes the updated context back to the global entity state memory, balancing plasticity against stability. Experiments on multiple benchmarks show that EST consistently improves diverse backbones and achieves state-of-the-art performance, highlighting the importance of state persistence for long-horizon TKG forecasting.

Evolving Beyond Snapshots: Harmonizing Structure and Sequence via Entity State Tuning for Temporal Knowledge Graph Forecasting

Detecting LLM-generated code is crucial for ensuring software provenance, security, reliability, and licensing compliance. Existing training-free detectors, mostly adapted from text-based methods, rely on global statistics of the Token Perplexity Sequence (TPS) and struggle with code. We reveal a key insight: despite the convergence of global statistics, LLM-generated and human-written code differ fundamentally in their local TPS dynamics: the former shows narrow transient spikes while the latter exhibits broad sustained fluctuations. To capture this distinction, we introduce CodeRipple, a novel training-free detection framework that employs wavelet analysis to characterize TPS morphology across scales. It jointly leverages the Stationary Wavelet Transform to model fluctuation shape and the Discrete Wavelet Transform to quantify cross-scale energy distribution. Evaluated on three challenging benchmarks spanning diverse programming languages, multiple generating LLMs, and various evasion strategies, CodeRipple consistently outperforms existing training-free methods, demonstrating its superior effectiveness and generalizability without any model training. Code available at: https://github.com/yaoxingyu77/CodeRipple.

CodeRipple: Wavelet-Based Detection of LLM-Generated Code

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in multimodal tasks, yet their reliability is persistently undermined by hallucinations—generating text that contradicts visual input. Recent studies often attribute these errors to inadequate visual attention. In this work, we analyze the attention mechanisms via the logit lens, uncovering a distinct anomaly we term **Vocabulary Hijacking**. We discover that specific visual tokens, defined as **Inert Tokens**, disproportionately attract attention. Crucially, when their intermediate hidden states are projected into the vocabulary space, they consistently decode to a fixed set of unrelated words (termed **Hijacking Anchors**) across layers, revealing a rigid semantic collapse. Leveraging this semantic rigidity, we propose **Hijacking Anchor-Based Identification (HABI)**, a robust strategy to accurately localize these Inert Tokens. To quantify the impact of this phenomenon, we introduce the **Non-Hijacked Visual Attention Ratio (NHAR)**, a novel metric designed to identify attention heads that remain resilient to hijacking and are critical for factual accuracy. Building on these insights, we propose **Hijacking-Aware Visual Attention Enhancement (HAVAE)**, a training-free intervention that selectively strengthens the focus of these identified heads on salient visual content. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that HAVAE significantly mitigates hallucinations with **no additional computational overhead**, while preserving the model's general capabilities.

Vocabulary Hijacking in LVLMs: Unveiling Critical Attention Heads by Excluding Inert Tokens to Mitigate Hallucination

Role-playing agents (RPAs) have made significant strides in mimicking static character identities. However, their personality simulations remain superficial, lacking a profound understanding of complex human psychological mechanisms. We identify a critical bottleneck termed "**Personality Inertia**"—a behavioral rigidity where RLHF-induced alignment bias traps models in a sanitized, "helpful assistant" persona. This inertia prevents models from adapting to diverse social contexts or expressing essential but negative traits under pressure. To bridge this gap, we propose **PD-LLM**, a situation-aware framework grounded in *Trait Activation Theory*. PD-LLM introduces **Bipolar Latent Decomposition**, which decouples personality traits into bidirectional LoRA adapters. These adapters are dynamically modulated by a situation-aware module based on the *DIAMONDS taxonomy*, allowing for precise behavioral regulation. Empirical results show that while baseline methods fail to synchronize multidimensional traits under pressure, PD-LLM achieves superior performance in both **static fidelity** and **dynamic adaptability**. By advancing from prompt engineering to intrinsic parameter control, PD-LLM effectively overcomes personality rigidity, facilitating the creation of vivid and psychologically consistent agents.

Trait Activation in Silicon: A Situation-Aware Framework for Psychologically Grounded Role-Playing

As applications of large language models (LLMs) become increasingly complex, the demand for robust complex instruction following capabilities is growing accordingly. We argue that a thorough understanding of the instruction itself, especially the latent reasoning structure embedded between the lines, is crucial for improving instruction following. Therefore we target complex instructions that involve implicit reasoning, intricate logical relations, and multi-constraint dependencies. We propose ImpRIF, a method to enhance LLMs' understanding of implicit reasoning instructions, thereby improving its ability to follow complex instructions. We formalize such instructions as verifiable reasoning graphs, enabling programmatic verification and graph-driven chain-of-thought reasoning. Based on this formulation, we synthesize large-scale single- and multi-turn data, propose fine-tuning with graph reasoning, and apply reinforcement learning to explicitly train models to reason along the graph. On five complex instruction following benchmarks, our models substantially outperform their base models. These results demonstrate that enhancing implicit reasoning capabilities can significantly improve complex instruction following. This project will be open-sourced in the near future.

ImpRIF: Stronger Implicit Reasoning Leads to Better Complex Instruction Following

Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) have recently achieved strong performance across various audio-centric tasks. However, hallucination, where models generate responses that are semantically incorrect or acoustically unsupported, remains largely underexplored in the audio domain. Existing hallucination benchmarks mainly focus on text or vision, while the few audio-oriented studies are limited in scale, modality coverage, and diagnostic depth. We therefore introduce HalluAudio, the first large-scale benchmark for evaluating hallucinations across speech, environmental sound, and music. HalluAudio comprises over 5K human-verified QA pairs and spans diverse task types, including binary judgments, multi-choice reasoning, attribute verification, and open-ended QA. To systematically induce hallucinations, we design adversarial prompts and mixed-audio conditions. Beyond accuracy, our evaluation protocol measures hallucination rate, yes/no bias, error-type analysis, and refusal rate, enabling a fine-grained analysis of LALM failure modes. We benchmark a broad range of open-source and proprietary models, providing the first large-scale comparison across speech, sound, and music. Our results reveal significant deficiencies in acoustic grounding, temporal reasoning, and music attribute understanding, underscoring the need for reliable and robust LALMs.

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