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Media narratives wield tremendous power in shaping public opinion, yet computational approaches struggle to capture the nuanced storytelling structures that communication theory emphasizes as central to how meaning is constructed. Existing approaches either miss subtle narrative patterns through coarse-grained analysis or require domain-specific taxonomies that limit scalability. To bridge this gap, we present a framework for inducing rich narrative schemas by jointly modeling events and characters via structured clustering. Our approach produces explainable narrative schemas that align with established framing theory while scaling to large corpora without exhaustive manual annotation.

ACL 2026

A Structured Clustering Approach for Inducing Media Narratives

## Welcome to EMNLP 2024! 
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EMNLP 2024

EMNLP 2024 will take place in Miami, Florida from Nov 12th to Nov 16th, 2024, at the Hyatt Regency Miami Hote and on Underline for remote participants.

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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.

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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.

Automatically solving optimization problems from natural language descriptions with both efficiency and reliability is highly desirable but remains challenging. Language model hallucinations and the limited availability of labeled datasets often result in misaligned formulations, code errors, and feasibility failures We propose \textbf{UMCTS}, an Uncertainty-aware Monte Carlo Tree Search framework that combines the language understanding capability of large language models with the reliability of well-established solvers. UMCTS structures the solution process into four stages: global instruction, assumptions, mathematical formulation, and solver code generation. It employs Monte Carlo Tree Search with semantic-equivalence pruning, prior-guided exploration, and solver-based feasibility checks. An LLM judge provides numerical reward signals, qualitative error information, and uncertainty estimates. These signals are backpropagated to guide the search and flag unreliable outputs. Across six public benchmarks, UMCTS achieves state-of-the-art solution accuracy, improves efficiency by reducing token usage.

Uncertainty-Aware Test-Time Search for Optimization Problem Solving

We investigate how role models shape collective morality. To explore this, we build a multi-agent simulation powered by a Large Language Models (LLMs), where agents with diverse intrinsic drives, ranging from cooperative to competitive, interact and adapt through a four-stage cognitive loop (plan-act-observe-reflect). We design four experimental games (Alignment, Collapse, Conflict, and Construction) and conduct motivational ablation studies to identify the key drivers of imitation. The results indicate that identity-driven conformity can substantially reshape the initial dispositions. Agents tend to adapt their values to align with a perceived successful exemplar, leading to rapid value convergence.

How do Role Models Shape Collective Morality? Exemplar-Driven Moral Learning in Multi-Agent Simulation

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Reward (RLVR) has significantly advanced the complex reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, it struggles to break through the inherent capability boundaries of the base LLM, due to its essentially on-policy strategy coupled with LLM's immense action space and sparse reward. Critically, RLVR can lead to the capability boundary collapse, narrowing the LLM's problem-solving scope. To address this problem, we propose R-PLUS, a novel hybrid-policy optimization approach for LLMs that synergizes internal exploitation with external data to achieve stronger reasoning capabilities and surpass the boundaries of base models. R-PLUS integrates two core components, i.e., Multiple Importance Sampling to address distributional mismatch from external data, and Exploration-Based Advantage Function to guide the model towards high-value, unexplored reasoning paths. We provide both theoretical analysis and extensive experiments to demonstrate the superiority and generalizability of our approach. Compared with existing RLVR methods, R-PLUS achieves 1) state-of-the-art performance on six math reasoning benchmarks; 2) superior performance on six out-of-distribution reasoning tasks; 3) consistent and significant gains across diverse model families, with average relative improvements up to 69.2%. Moreover, the analysis of Pass@k curves indicates that R-PLUS effectively resolves the capability boundary collapse problem.

RL-PLUS: Countering Capability Boundary Collapse of LLMs in Reinforcement Learning with Hybrid-policy Optimization

In drug discovery, molecular optimization aims to iteratively refine a lead compound to improve molecular properties while preserving structural similarity to the original molecule. However, each oracle evaluation is expensive, making sample efficiency a key challenge for existing methods under a limited oracle budget. Trial-and-error approaches require many oracle calls, while methods that leverage external knowledge tend to reuse familiar templates and struggle on challenging objectives. A key missing piece is long-term memory that can ground decisions and provide reusable insights for future optimizations. To address this, we present MolMem (\textbf{Mol}ecular optimization with \textbf{Mem}ory), a multi-turn agentic reinforcement learning (RL) framework with a dual-memory system. Specifically, MolMem uses Static Exemplar Memory to retrieve relevant exemplars for cold-start grounding, and Evolving Skill Memory to distill successful trajectories into reusable strategies. Built on this memory-augmented formulation, we train the policy with dense step-wise rewards, turning costly rollouts into long-term knowledge that improves future optimization. Extensive experiments show that MolMem achieves 90\% success on single-property tasks (1.5$\times$ over the best baseline) and 52\% on multi-property tasks using only 500 oracle calls. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/REAL-Lab-NU/MolMem}.

MolMem: Memory-Augmented Agentic Reinforcement Learning for Sample-Efficient Molecular Optimization

Direct Alignment Algorithms (DAAs) such as DPO simplify RLHF by optimizing policies directly from preference pairs. However, the Bradley–Terry probability-gap objective can induce likelihood displacement and, under weak KL constraints, may even reduce the probability of preferred responses, while implicit rewards can be limited in generalizaiton. We propose Reward Alignment Optimization (RAO), a point-wise direct alignment method that uses an explicit reward model to specify exact target generation probabilities and align the policy offline towards them. Our key insight is a theoretical principle we call "prefix consistency", which links the normalization terms of prompts that share a prefix. Leveraging this property, RAO decouples target reward differentials from bias terms, prevents decreasing preferred-response probabilities, and better exploits reward information both within and across prompts. Extensive experiments on multiple base LLMs show that RAO consistently outperforms existing DAAs while enabling controllable target probability distributions.

Reward Alignment Optimization: A Direct Point-wise Alignment Approach

Can Large Language models (LLMs) accurately simulate the next web action of a specific user? While LLMs have shown promising capabilities in generating believable human behaviors, evaluating their ability to mimic real user behaviors remains an open challenge, largely due to the lack of high-quality, publicly available datasets that capture both the observable actions and the internal reasoning of an actual human user. To address this gap, we introduce OPeRA, a novel dataset of Observation, Persona, Rationale, and Action collected from real human participants during online shopping sessions. **OPeRA is the first public dataset that comprehensively captures: user personas, browser observations, fine-grained web actions, and self-reported just-in-time rationales**. We developed both an online questionnaire and a custom browser plugin to gather this dataset with high fidelity. Using OPeRA, we establish **the first benchmark to evaluate how well current LLMs can predict a specific user’s next action** and rationale with a given persona and <observation, action, rationale> history. This dataset lays the groundwork for future research into LLM agents that aim to act as personalized digital twins for human.

 OPeRA: A Dataset of Observation, Persona, Rationale, and Action for Evaluating LLMs on Human Online Shopping Behavior Simulation

Existing text-guided image editing methods primarily rely on end-to-end pixel-level inpainting paradigm. Despite its success in simple scenarios, this paradigm still significantly struggles with compositional editing tasks that require precise local control and complex multi-object spatial reasoning. This paradigm is severely limited by 1) the implicit coupling of planning and execution, 2) the lack of object-level control granularity, and 3) the reliance on unstructured, pixel-centric modeling. To address these limitations, we propose I2E, a novel "Decompose-then-Action'' paradigm that revisits image editing as an actionable interaction process within a structured environment. I2E utilizes a Decomposer to transform unstructured images into discrete, manipulable object layers and then introduces a physics-aware Vision-Language-Action Agent to parse complex instructions into a series of atomic actions via Chain-of-Thought reasoning. Further, we also construct I2E-Bench, a benchmark designed for multi-instance spatial reasoning and high-precision editing. Experimental results on I2E-Bench and multiple public benchmarks demonstrate that I2E significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in handling complex compositional instructions, maintaining physical plausibility, and ensuring multi-turn editing stability.

I2E: From Image Pixels to Actionable Interactive Environments for Text-Guided Image Editing

Large language models (LLMs) encode problem difficulty as an internal signal that can be linearly decoded from their residuals. Given their multilingual capabilities, we investigate whether this meta-cognitive signal is language-agnostic and how it is organized across the model’s layers by training linear probes on the AMC subset of the Easy2Hard benchmark, translated into 21 languages. We found that difficulty-related signals emerge at two distinct stages of the model internals, corresponding to shallow (early-layers) and deep (later-layers) internal representations, that exhibit functionally different behaviors. Probes trained on deep representations achieve high accuracy when evaluated on the same language but exhibit weaker cross-lingual transfer. In contrast, probes trained on shallow representations generalize better across languages, despite achieving lower within-language performance. This closely aligns with existing findings in LLM interpretability, showing that models tend to operate in an abstract conceptual space before producing language-specific outputs. Our results suggest that this two-stage organizational principle extends beyond simple semantic processing to meta-cognitive properties such as problem difficulty, highlighting an internal control signal that is not tied to surface meaning.

A Shared Geometry of Difficulty in Multilingual Language Models

Code-switching (CSW) is the act of alternating between two or more languages within a single discourse. This phenomenon is widespread in multilingual communities and increasingly prevalent online, exposing large language models (LLMs) to mixed-language inputs. We present a systematic evaluation of LLM *comprehension* under code-switching by generating linguistically grounded CSW variants of established benchmarks (Belebele, MMLU, XNLI) across five typologically diverse languages. Our contributions are: (i) a controlled pipeline for producing CSW test sets that respect linguistic constraints on code-switching; (ii) a multi-model, multi-language analysis showing that inserting non-English tokens into English consistently reduces accuracy on comprehension and reasoning benchmarks, whereas embedding English into non-English contexts often improves it; and (iii) a mitigation study contrasting in-context learning (ICL) with fine-tuning. Across model families, ICL cues yield inconsistent, and sometimes negative, effects, while fine-tuning on CSW data provides modest but reliable gains, partially recovering accuracy under CSW.

Lost in the Mix: Evaluating LLM Understanding of Code-Switched Text

Generative listwise reranking leverages global context for superior retrieval but is plagued by intrinsic position bias, where models exhibit structural sensitivity to input order independent of relevance. Existing mitigations present a dilemma: inference-time aggregation incurs prohibitive latency, while training-based methods often fail to eradicate ingrained priors, particularly in compact models. To resolve this dilemma, we propose CapCal (Content-Agnostic Probability Calibration), a training-free framework that mechanically decouples positional bias from ranking decisions. By estimating the bias distribution via content-free placeholders, CapCal rectifies output logits through an entropy-adaptive contrastive mechanism. Evaluations across 10 benchmarks confirm that CapCal achieves superior performance among training-free methods while preserving single-pass efficiency. Notably, it unlocks the latent potential of lightweight models (e.g., 0.6B), delivering absolute NDCG gains exceeding 10 points and outperforming computationally expensive data augmentation strategies.

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