United States

Memory-Augmented Generation (MAG) extends large language models with external memory to support long-context reasoning, but existing approaches largely rely on semantic similarity over monolithic memory stores, entangling temporal, causal, and entity information. This design limits interpretability and alignment between query intent and retrieved evidence, leading to suboptimal reasoning accuracy. In this paper, we propose MAGMA, a multi-graph agentic memory architecture that represents each memory item across orthogonal semantic, temporal, causal, and entity graphs. MAGMA formulates retrieval as policy-guided traversal over these relational views, enabling query-adaptive selection and structured context construction. By decoupling memory representation from retrieval logic, MAGMA provides transparent reasoning paths and fine-grained control over retrieval. Experiments on LoCoMo and LongMemEval demonstrate that MAGMA consistently outperforms state-of-the-art agentic memory systems in long-horizon reasoning task.

ACL 2026

MAGMA: A Multi-Graph based Agentic Memory Architecture for AI 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. 

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. <br>
[Full Message from General Chair Philipp Koehn](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QiJFOmMjvDgsDo3i1XzlQnImxe3RU_Cy/view?usp=sharing) <br><br><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.

As Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) acquire stronger reasoning capabilities to handle complex, multi-image instructions, this advancement may pose new safety risks. We study this problem by introducing MIR-SafetyBench, the first benchmark focused on multi-image reasoning safety, which consists of 2,676 instances across a taxonomy of 9 multi-image relations. Our extensive evaluations on 19 MLLMs reveal a troubling trend: models with more advanced multi-image reasoning can be more vulnerable on MIR-SafetyBench. Beyond attack success rates, we find that many responses labeled as safe are superficial, often driven by misunderstanding or evasive, non-committal replies. We further observe that unsafe generations exhibit lower attention entropy than safe ones on average. This internal signature suggests a possible risk that models may over-focus on task solving while neglecting safety constraints.

The Side Effects of Being Smart: Safety Risks in MLLMs’ Multi-Image Reasoning

We present Omni-I2C, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate the capability of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) in converting complex, structured digital graphics into executable code. We argue that this task represents a non-trivial challenge for the current generation of LMMs: it demands an unprecedented synergy between high-fidelity visual perception—to parse intricate spatial hierarchies and symbolic details—and precise generative expression—to synthesize syntactically sound and logically consistent code. Unlike traditional descriptive tasks, Omni-I2C requires a holistic understanding where any minor perceptual hallucination or coding error leads to a complete failure in visual reconstruction. Omni-I2C features 1130 meticulously curated samples, defined by its breadth across subjects, image modalities, and programming languages. By incorporating authentic user-sourced cases, the benchmark spans a vast spectrum of digital content—from scientific visualizations to complex symbolic notations—each paired with executable reference code. To complement this diversity, our evaluation framework provides necessary depth; by decoupling performance into perceptual fidelity and symbolic precision, it transcends surface-level accuracy to expose the granular structural failures and reasoning bottlenecks of current LMMs. Our evaluation reveals a substantial performance gap among leading LMMs; even state-of-the-art models struggle to preserve structural integrity in complex scenarios, underscoring that multimodal code generation remains a formidable challenge. Data and code are available at https://github.com/MiliLab/Omni-I2C.

Omni-I2C: A Holistic Benchmark for High-Fidelity Image-to-Code Generation

Safety alignment of large language models currently faces a central challenge: existing alignment techniques often prioritize mitigating responses to harmful prompts at the expense of overcautious behavior, leading models to incorrectly refuse benign requests. A key goal of safe alignment is therefore to improve safety while simultaneously minimizing false refusals. In this work, we introduce Energy Landscape Steering (ELS), a novel, fine-tuning free framework designed to resolve this challenge through dynamic, inference-time intervention. We trained a lightweight, external Energy-Based Model (EBM) to assign high energy to undesirable (false refusal or jailbreak) states and low energy to desirable (helpful response or safe reject) ones. During inference, the EBM maps the LLM’s internal activations to an energy landscape, and we use the gradient of the energy function to steer the hidden states toward low-energy regions in real time. This dynamically guides the model toward desirable behavior without modifying its parameters. By decoupling behavioral control from the model’s core knowledge, ELS provides a flexible and computationally efficient solution. Extensive experiments across diverse models demonstrate its effectiveness: raising compliance on the ORB-H benchmark from 57.3% to 82.6% while maintaining the baseline safety performance. Our work establishes a promising paradigm for building LLMs that simultaneously achieve high safety and low false refusal rates.

Mitigating Over-Refusal in Aligned Large Language Models via Inference-Time Activation Energy

Cultural alignment in Large Language Models (LLMs) is essential for producing contextually aware, respectful, and trustworthy outputs. Without it, models risk generating stereotyped, insensitive, or misleading responses that fail to reflect cultural diversity w.r.t Helpful, Harmless, and Honest (HHH) paradigm. Existing benchmarks represent early steps toward cultural alignment; yet, no benchmarks currently enables systematic evaluation of cultural alignment in line with UNESCO’s principles of cultural diversity w.r.t HHH paradigm. Therefore, to address this gap, we built Align-Cultura, two-stage pipeline for cultural alignment. Stage I constructs CULTURAX, the HHH-English dataset grounded in the UNESCO cultural taxonomy, through Query Construction, which reclassifies prompts, expands underrepresented domains (or labels), and prevents data leakage with SimHash. Then, Response Generation pairs prompts with culturally grounded responses via two-stage rejection sampling. The final dataset contains 1,500 samples spanning 30 subdomains of tangible and intangible cultural forms. Stage II benchmarks CULTURAX on general-purpose models, culturally fine-tuned models, and open-weight LLMs (Qwen3-8B and DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-7B). Empirically, culturally fine-tuned models improve joint HHH by 4%–6%, reduce cultural failures by 18%, achieve 10%–12% efficiency gains, and limit leakage to 0.3%.

AlignCultura: Towards Culturally Aligned Large Language Models?

Transformers operate as horizontal token-by-token scanners; at each generation step, attending to an ever-growing sequence of token-level states. This access pattern increases prefill latency and makes long-context decoding more memory-bound, as KV-cache reads and writes dominate inference time over arithmetic operations. We propose Parallel Hierarchical Operation for TOp-down Networks (PHOTON), a hierarchical autoregressive model that replaces horizontal scanning with vertical, multi-resolution context scanning. PHOTON maintains a hierarchy of latent streams: a bottom-up encoder compresses tokens into low-rate contextual states, while lightweight top-down decoders reconstruct fine-grained token representations in parallel. We further introduce recursive generation that updates only the coarsest latent stream and eliminates bottom-up re-encoding. Experimental results show that PHOTON is superior to competitive Transformer-based language models regarding the throughput-quality trade-off, providing advantages in long-context and multi-query tasks. In particular, this reduces decode-time KV-cache traffic, yielding up to $10^{3} \times$ higher throughput per unit memory.

PHOTON: Hierarchical Autoregressive Modeling for Lightspeed and Memory-Efficient Language Generation

We present ***HowToNarrate***, the first general-domain benchmark for Synchronized Video Narration. The benchmark contains 3.2K videos across seven domains, segmented into 37.5K clips with aligned narrations and associated external knowledge. Effective narration requires models to *understand visual scenes*, incorporate *relevant knowledge*, and produce *coherent, length-appropriate* descriptions. We systematically benchmark current Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) on these abilities. Our analysis shows that existing MLLMs overemphasize knowledge retrieval while largely neglecting prior context (receiving less than 10% attention). Moreover, they often conflate narration context with external knowledge, leading to redundancy and incoherence. To mitigate these issues, we propose VideoNarrationAgent, a multi-agent framework that combines context compression, knowledge retrieval, and narration generation. Experiments demonstrate that our method significantly improves MLLM performance. Furthermore, instruction tuning on HowToNarrate enhances both context-awareness and length control, boosting Qwen2.5-VL’s score from 25 to 84. We will release all data and code to support future research in synchronized video narration.

HowToNarrate: A General-Domain Benchmark for Synchronized Video Narration with External Knowledge

Vision-Language-Action models have recently emerged as a powerful paradigm for general-purpose robot learning, enabling agents to map visual observations and natural-language instructions into executable robotic actions. Though popular, they are primarily trained via supervised fine-tuning or training-time reinforcement learning, requiring explicit fine-tuning phases, human interventions, or controlled data collection. Consequently, existing methods remain unsuitable for challenging simulated- or physical-world deployments, where robots must respond autonomously and flexibly to evolving environments. To address this limitation, we introduce a Test-Time Reinforcement Learning for VLAs (TT-VLA), a framework that enables on-the-fly policy adaptation during inference. TT-VLA formulates a dense reward mechanism that leverages step-by-step task-progress signals to refine action policies during test time while preserving the SFT/RL-trained priors, making it an effective supplement to current VLA models. Empirical results show that our approach enhances overall adaptability, stability, and task success in dynamic, previously unseen scenarios under simulated and real-world settings. We believe TT-VLA offers a principled step toward self-improving, deployment-ready VLAs.

On-the-Fly VLA Adaptation via Test-Time Reinforcement Learning

Multimodal Emotion Recognition in Conversation aims to identify emotions within a dialogue with multimodal data, including audio, visual, and textual features. While existing methods have made significant improvements, there are two fundamental limitations to be addressed. From the modality fusion perspective, current approaches treat all modalities as functionally equivalent during fusion, overlooking their distinct communicative roles and information capacities, in which text conveys explicit semantic meaning while audio provides paralinguistic cues. From the emotion label perspective, many works ignore the continuous structure of emotion characterized by psychological theory and apply uniform penalties regardless of affective proximity. To address these limitations, we propose EMART, EMotion-Wheel-Guided Audio-Referred Text Representation for ERC, specifically focusing on audio and text modalities. First, we propose a modality-aware fusion strategy capturing linguistic features from text as the primary source and audio as a complementary component. Secondly, we propose an emotion-wheel-guided supervised contrastive loss to encode emotional proximity based on Russell’s circumplex model. Experimental results on IEMOCAP and MELD demonstrate outstanding performance. The code is available at: https://github.com/DILAB-HYU/EMART.git.

Emotion-Wheel-Guided Audio-Referred Text Representation for Multimodal Emotion Recognition in Conversation

Vision Language Models (VLMs) are good at recognizing the global location of a photograph -- their geolocation prediction accuracy rivals the best human experts. But many VLMs are startlingly bad at \textit{explaining} which image evidence led to their prediction, even when their location prediction is correct. The reasoning chains produced by VLMs frequently hallucinate scene attributes to support their location prediction (e.g. phantom writing, imagined infrastructure, misidentified flora). In this paper, we introduce the first benchmark for geolocation reasoning chains. We focus on the global location prediction task in the popular GeoGuessr game which draws from Google Street View spanning more than 100 countries. We collaborate with expert GeoGuessr players, including the reigning world champion, to produce 800 ``ground truth'' reasoning chains for 500 query scenes. These expert reasoning chains address hundreds of different discriminative visual attributes such as license plate shape, architecture, and soil properties to name just a few. We evaluate LLM-as-a-judge and VLM-as-a-judge strategies for scoring VLM-generated reasoning chains against our expert reasoning chains and find that Qwen 3 LLM-as-a-judge correlates best with human scoring. Our benchmark reveals that while large, closed-source VLMs such as Gemini and GPT 5 rival human experts at prediction locations, they still lag behind human experts when it comes to producing auditable reasoning chains. Open weights VLMs such as Llama and Qwen catastrophically fail on our benchmark -- they perform only slightly better than a baseline in which an LLM hallucinates a reasoning chain with oracle knowledge of the photo location but \textit{no visual information at all}. We believe the gap between human experts and VLMs on this task points to VLM limitations at extracting fine-grained visual attributes from high resolution images. We open source our benchmark for the community to use.

GeoRC: A Benchmark for Geolocation Reasoning Chains

Instruction tuning plays a crucial role in enhancing large language models (LLMs) to better understand complex user instructions. While various data selection and revision methods have been explored to optimize instruction tuning datasets, they face two main challenges: unreasonable pruning of potentially valuable low-quality data and the persistence of noise or semantic drift during revision. To address these issues, we propose a novel automated iterative framework for instruction data optimization. Our framework introduces Instruction Quality Differentiation to identify valuable high-quality and low-quality data across multiple dimensions. For low-quality data, we propose a Feedback-driven Iterative Refinement mechanism with an "evaluate-refine-review" process and design an Output Alignment module to improve data quality. Experiments on seven public benchmark datasets show that our framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving 2.09% and 2.60% improvements on the Alpaca and Dolly datasets, respectively, with high data efficiency. Our code and data are available at the anonymous link https:
//github.com/surihuhang/From-Selection-to-Refinement--Iterative-Optimization-for-Instruction-Data.

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