United States

Multimodal sentiment analysis is fundamentally challenged by semantic incongruence, where ambiguous visual signals often conflict with explicit textual cues. In semi-supervised scenarios, naively fusing such noisy features contaminates the joint representation, while conventional static alignment strategies fail to effectively arbitrate conflicting modalities in this task, leading to error reinforcement during self-training. To this end, we propose a novel Adaptive Arbitration for Semantic Incongruence (A2SI) framework for semi-supervised multimodal sentiment analysis, which emphasizes stable cross-modal representations and reliable supervision. Specifically, we first constrain unreliable visual representations by leveraging the reliable textual modality as an anchor to align divergent embeddings and reduce representation noise. Based on this, we further consider the reliability of supervision signals and calibrate pseudo-labels by adaptively weighting evidentiary confidence from heterogeneous views. Finally, to prevent error accumulation caused by unreliable samples, we introduce a progressive arbitration mechanism that verifies pseudo-labeled data from dual perspectives, enabling the model to dynamically balance sample diversity and label purity throughout self-training. Extensive experiments on the MVSA-Single and MVSA-Multiple datasets demonstrate that A2SI consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods under label-limited settings.

ACL 2026

Beyond Static Alignment: Adaptive Arbitration for Semantic Incongruence in Semi-Supervised Multimodal Sentiment Analysis

The purpose of the AAAI conference is to promote research in artificial intelligence (AI) and scientific exchange among AI researchers, practitioners, scientists, and engineers in affiliated disciplines. 

AAAI 2021

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>
[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.

Recent agentic search frameworks enable deep research via iterative planning and retrieval, reducing hallucinations and enhancing factual grounding. However, they remain text-centric, overlooking the multimodal evidence that characterizes real-world expert reports. We introduce a pressing task: multimodal long-form generation. Accordingly, we propose Deep-Reporter, a unified agentic framework for grounded multimodal long-form generation. It orchestrates: (i) Agentic Multimodal Search and Filtering to retrieve and filter textual passages and information-dense visuals; (ii) Checklist-Guided Incremental Synthesis to ensure coherent image-text integration and optimal citation placement; and (iii) Recurrent Context Management to balance long-range coherence with local fluency. We develop a rigorous curation pipeline producing 8K high-quality agentic traces for model optimization. We further introduce M$^2$LongBench, a comprehensive testbed comprising 247 research tasks across 9 domains and a stable multimodal sandbox. It enables unified multimodal assessment, fair comparison, and accessible evaluation without commercial APIs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that long-form multimodal generation is a challenging task, especially in multimodal selection and integration, and effective post-training can bridge the gap. Our code is available at https://github.com/fangda-ye/Deep-Report.

Deep-Reporter: Deep Research for Grounded Multimodal Long-Form Generation

Despite scaling to massive context windows, Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle with multi-hop reasoning due to inherent position bias, which causes them to overlook information at certain positions. Whether these failures stem from an inability to locate evidence (recognition failure) or integrate it (synthesis failure) is unclear. We introduce Multi-Focus Attention Instruction (MFAI), a semantic probe to disentangle these mechanisms by explicitly steering attention towards selected positions. Across 5 LLMs on two multi-hop QA tasks (MuSiQue and NeoQA), we identify the "Weakest Link Effect": in our 18-document, 3-bucket setting, multi-hop reasoning performance collapses to the level of the least visible evidence, governed by absolute position rather than the linear distance between facts. While matched MFAI resolves recognition bottlenecks, improving accuracy by up to 11.49% in low-visibility positions, misleading MFAI yields divergent effects modulated by task topology: entity-centric tasks with vertical reasoning chains are vulnerable, whereas event-centric tasks with horizontal evidence structures are more resilient. Finally, we demonstrate that "thinking" models utilizing System-2 reasoning effectively locate and integrate the required information, matching gold-only baselines even in noisy, long-context settings. Supplementary experiments on 2WikiMultiHopQA, extended 3-4 hop counts, and a 32B model confirm these findings generalize across datasets, reasoning depths, and model scales.

Failure Modes in Multi-Hop QA: The Weakest Link Effect and the Recognition Bottleneck

Climate decision-making in the GCC states increasingly demands systems that can translate heterogeneous scientific and policy evidence into actionable guidance, yet general-purpose large language models (LLMs) remain weak both in region-specific climate knowledge and grounded interaction with geospatial and forecasting tools. We present the GCA framework, which unifies (i) GCA-DS, a curated multimodal dataset grounded in the GCC states, and (ii) Gulf Climate Agent (GCA), a tool-augmented agent for climate analysis. GCA-DS comprises nearly 200k question-answer pairs spanning governmental policies and adaptation plans, NGO and international frameworks, academic literature, and event-driven reporting on heatwaves, dust storms, and floods, complemented with remote-sensing inputs that couple imagery with textual evidence. Building on this foundation, the GCA agent orchestrates a modular tool pipeline grounded in real-time and historical signals and geospatial processing that produces derived indices and interpretable visualizations. Finally, we benchmark open and proprietary LLMs on climate tasks in the GCC states and show that domain fine-tuning and tool integration substantially improve reliability over general-purpose baselines.

GCA Framework: A GCC Countries–Grounded Dataset and Agentic Pipeline for Climate Decision Support

Existing user simulators based on prompting to role-play or SFT are generally confined to imitating users’ textual utterances, without adequately considering the multi-faceted cognitive processes that underlie human decision-making during interactions. To facilitate better alignment with real human thinking patterns, we construct the LMSYS-UserThinking dataset, in which we augment 51k human–LLM conversations by reconstructing the user’s inner reasoning both during and at the end of each dialogue. Furthermore, to enhance controllability and situational coherence, we introduce scenario settings that describe the global context and user goals throughout multi-turn conversations. Using this dataset, we train user simulators called ThinkingUS on different base models. We evaluate our approach from both offline and online user simulation perspectives, ultimately demonstrating its effectiveness.

Thinking Alignment of Scenario-Oriented User Simulation

Recent breakthroughs in Transformer-based large models, have driven widespread tasks, yet their reliance on centralized cloud deployment raises significant privacy risks due to sensitive data exposure. While edge-based collaborative inference offers a privacy-preserving alternative, existing methods face critical limitations: static model partitioning cannot adapt to dynamic edge resource fluctuations, and rigid multi-head attention handling overlooks semantic-critical prioritization and parallelism. We propose EdgeFormer, a latency-aware framework for distributed Transformer inference in resource-constrained edge networks. EdgeFormer dynamically allocates model blocks across devices via efficiency-storage trade-off optimization and introduces collaborative Multi-Head Attention (cMHA), which distributes semantic-critical attention heads across devices while pruning redundant ones under real-time constraints. We further develop LiScore, a composite metric integrating attention diversity and latency costs, alongside a similarity-based retrieval method to reduce recomputation overhead. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EdgeFormer achieves up to 2.01 $\\times$
inference acceleration over state-of-the-art baselines with $\\leq$1.06% accuracy loss, maintaining robustness under varying edge conditions.

EdgeFormer: Latency-Aware Collaborative Multi-Head Attention of Transformer Inference in Edge Networks

Multimodal emotion cause analysis in conversation aims to identify the causes of emotions by leveraging multimodal information. Existing studies mainly formulate this problem as either utterance-level emotion cause extraction, which provides clear cause localization but limited explanation, or multimodal emotion cause generation, which offers fine-grained explanations but lacks explicit traceability to source utterances. Moreover, existing datasets rely heavily on human judgment and lack well-defined structured theoretical guidance, leading to subjective and inconsistent annotations. To address these issues, we introduce joint Multimodal Emotion Cause Extraction and Summarization in conversation (MECES), a new task that simultaneously extracts emotion cause utterances and generates cause summaries, enabling both precise localization and interpretable explanations of emotion cause. We further construct a MECES dataset guided by the Activating Events–Beliefs–Consequences theory from psychology. This dataset consists of 5,787 emotion utterances annotated with causes, comprising 12,231 emotion-cause pairs and 6,040 cause summaries. We also propose an effective end-to-end joint learning approach for MECES task, establishing strong benchmark results for this newly introduced task and dataset.

Locate and Explain: Joint Multimodal Emotion Cause Extraction and Summarization in Conversation

Recent retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) approaches have demonstrated strong capability in handling complex queries, yet current research overlooks a critical challenge: different retrievers require fundamentally different query formulation strategies for optimal performance. In this work, we present the first systematic analysis of how LLMs can learn to adapt their query formulation strategies for different retrievers via reinforcement learning (RL). Our empirical study reveals that RL effectively teaches an LLM to tailor its queries to specific retriever characteristics. We discover that different retrievers exhibit surprisingly distinct optimal query styles (e.g., descriptive vs. question-like), suggesting strategies learned for one retriever ineffective for another. We further show that performance can be enhanced by incorporating retriever-specific human guidance and by scaling model size. To facilitate learning over multi-retrieval-step trajectories, we introduce a branching-based rollout technique that improves training stability. Our work provides the first empirical evidence and actionable insights for building truly retriever-aware RAG systems. Code and resources are available at https://github.com/LCO-Embedding/Envs-aware-Information-Retrieval.

Understanding the Behaviors of Environment-aware Information Retrieval

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged with remarkable capabilities in complex tasks through Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning, practical resource constraints have sparked interest in transferring these abilities to smaller models. However, achieving both domain performance and cross-domain generalization remains challenging. Existing approaches typically restrict students to following a single golden rationale and treat different reasoning paths independently. Due to distinct inductive biases and intrinsic preferences, alongside the student's evolving capacity and reasoning preferences during training, a teacher's "optimal" rationale could act as out-of-distribution noise. This misalignment leads to a degeneration of the student's latent reasoning distribution, causing suboptimal performance. To bridge this gap, we propose MIND, a capability-adaptive framework that transitions distillation from passive mimicry to active cognitive construction. We synthesize diverse teacher perspectives through a novel "Teaching Assistant" network. By employing a novel Feedback-Driven Inertia Calibration mechanism, this network utilizes inertia-filtered training loss to align supervision with the student’s current adaptability, effectively enhancing performance while mitigating catastrophic forgetting. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MIND achieves state-of-the-art performance on both in-distribution and out-of-distribution benchmarks, and our sophisticated latent space analysis further confirms the mechanism of reasoning ability internalization.

MIND: From Passive Mimicry to Active Reasoning through Capability-Aware Multi-Perspective CoT Distillation

Online safety in low-resource languages hinges not only on accurate hate speech detection but also on transparent, culturally grounded explanations. Yet prior works in Bangla largely focus on hate classification, while overlooking interpretability. We address this gap by introducing BanHADEX, the first hate explainability dataset in Bangla with human-annotated labels. BanHADEX contains 19,203 YouTube comments spanning April 2024–June 2025, annotated for binary hate classification with seven fine-grained hate categories, seven target groups, and concise explanations for each sample. Our data pipeline relies on a two‑stage annotation protocol that uses majority voting for robust labeling. Our rich suite of experiments on open and closed-source LLMs reveals that explanation‑guided LoRA substantially outperforms both classification and explanation quality across prompting and fine-tuning strategies. BanHADEX establishes the groundworks for faithful interpretability and safer moderation in linguistically rich yet under-resourced languages.

BanHADEX: Towards Explainable HAte Speech Detection in Bangla Using Human Annotated EXplanation

Existing works on defending against LLM backdoor attacks rely on either auxiliary models or safety-related datasets for defending against backdoor attacks on large language models, which are not always available. To address these challenges, we propose our we propose our Contrastive-Selective Activation Decomposition and Steering (CS-ADS), which contrasts relatively more benign and poisoned settings to decompose the feature vectors for steering without relying on additional auxiliary models or datasets. With such disentangled vectors for remediation, our method can achieve feasible defense qualities even better than dataset-based contrastive steering strategies. This novel decomposition-based solution is motivated by the key insight that feature representations of prompt pairs can encode the same benign semantics in different proportions, even when both prompt pairs are similarly backdoored. Such discrepancies allow our method to identify effective remediation directions for steering the generation process, thereby preventing undesired outputs. We evaluate CS-ADS against multiple state-of-the-art backdoor attacks, and experimental results show that CS-ADS provides effective defense across settings.

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