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Traditional task-oriented dialog systems are unable to evolve from ongoing interactions or adapt to new domains after deployment, that is a critical limitation in real-world dynamic environments. Continual learning approaches depend on episodic retraining with human-curated data, failing to achieve autonomy lifelong improvement. While evolutionary computation and LLM driven self-improvement offer promising mechanisms for dialog optimization, they lack a unified framework for holistic, iterative strategy refinement. To bridge this gap, we propose DarwinTOD, a lifelong self-evolving dialog framework that systematically integrates these two paradigms, enabling continuous strategy optimization from a zero-shot base without task-specific fine-tuning. DarwinTOD maintains an Evolvable Strategy Bank and operates through a dual-loop process: online multi-agent dialog execution with peer critique, and offline structured evolutionary operations that refine the strategy bank using accumulated feedback. This closed-loop design enables autonomous continuous improvement without human intervention. Extensive experiments show that DarwinTOD surpasses previous state-of-the-art methods and exhibits continuous performance gains throughout evolution. Our work provides a novel framework for building dialog systems with lifelong self-evolution capabilities.

ACL 2026

DarwinTOD: LLM-Driven Lifelong Self-evolution for Task-oriented Dialog Systems

EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible. The experience for on-site participants would closely approximate a normal pre-COVID *ACL conference, with 5-6 thematically organized parallel sessions and live Q/A and interactive discussion immediately after the talks. Presentations by virtual participants will be equitably interleaved with those of on-site participants, projected on the auditorium screens as if on-site, and also followed immediately by live Q/A and interactive discussion at a time during reasonable waking hours for the virtual presenter. For all participants, on-site and virtual, who are unable to attend a session due to either time-zone issues or because they are participating in another session live, talk recordings and slides will be available online at a minimum after the live presentation (and in many cases before as well), and questions may be submitted in advance on session-specific discussion boards and answered live in session with the usual visual aids if desired.

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EMNLP 2021

EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible.

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.

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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.

Existing vision-language models (VLMs) often suffer from visual hallucination, where the generated responses contain inaccuracies that are not grounded in the visual input. Efforts to address this issue without model finetuning primarily mitigate hallucination by contrastively reducing language biases or amplifying the weights of visual embedding during decoding. However, these approaches remain limited in their ability to capture fine-grained visual details. In this work, we propose the Perception Magnifier (PM), a novel visual decoding method that iteratively isolates relevant visual tokens based on attention and magnifies the corresponding regions, spurring the model to concentrate on fine-grained visual details during decoding. By magnifying critical regions while preserving the structural and contextual information at each decoding step, PM allows the VLM to enhance its scrutiny of the visual input, hence producing more accurate and faithful responses. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that PM not only achieves superior hallucination mitigation but also enhances language generation while preserving strong reasoning capabilities.

Through the Magnifying Glass: Adaptive Perception Magnification for Hallucination-Free VLM Decoding

Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) offer an efficient alternative to autoregressive models through parallel decoding, yet existing post-training methods largely rely on random masking strategies that overlook intrinsic token dependencies. In this work, we present an empirical analysis of attention in dLLMs and show that tokens attending more strongly to revealed context exhibit greater generation stability and play a critical role in reasoning. Motivated by these findings, we propose AGDO, an attention-guided denoising and optimization framework that aligns both training and optimization with attention-derived dependencies. AGDO determines the denoising order based on attention structure and emphasizes attention-critical tokens during supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning. Experiments on mathematical and coding benchmarks demonstrate that AGDO consistently improves reasoning performance, outperforming state-of-the-art post-training methods for dLLMs.

Beyond Fully Random Masking: Attention-Guided Denoising and Optimization for Diffusion Language Models

Recent advances in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have improved performance in multi-modal learning, raising the question of whether these models truly understand the content they process. Crucially, can VLMs detect when a reasoning process is wrong and identify its error type? To answer this, we present MMErroR, a multi-modal benchmark of 1997 samples, each embedding a single coherent reasoning error. These samples span 24 subdomains across six top-level domains, ensuring broad coverage and taxonomic richness. Unlike existing benchmarks that focus on answer correctness, MMErroR targets a process-level, error-centric evaluation that requires models to detect incorrect reasoning and classify the error type within both visual and linguistic contexts. We evaluate 12 representative VLMs, and even the best model, Gemini-3-Pro-Preview, classifies the error correctly in only 66.65\% of cases, underscoring the challenge of identifying erroneous reasoning. Furthermore, the ability to accurately identify errors offers valuable insights into the capabilities of multi-modal models.
Project Page: https://mmerror-benchmark.github.io

MMErroR: A Benchmark for Erroneous Reasoning in Vision-Language Models

Relation extraction (RE) identifies semantic relations between entities in text, with existing methods falling into two main paradigms: discriminative and generative. Discriminative models encode sentences and entities into relation representations and classify the most likely relation, whereas generative models directly produce relation labels through sequence generation. Although the latter have benefited from recent advances in large language models (LLMs), their performance remains limited by bottlenecks. In this work, we present the systematic investigation of how discriminative models can support generative RE. We propose the Discriminative-to-Generative (D2G) framework, which first leverages discriminative models to produce a top-k set of candidate relations, and then integrates this knowledge into generative models via in-context or prompt learning. Extensive experiments on five widely used RE benchmarks demonstrate that D2G consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance, with notable gains on long-tailed relation classes.

On the Role of Discriminative Models in Generative Relation Extraction

Recent advances in Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) trained with Long Chain-of-Thought have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in code generation and mathematical reasoning. However, their potential in multi-turn Text-to-SQL tasks remains largely underexplored. Existing approaches typically rely on unstable API-based inference or require expensive fine-tuning on small-scale models. In this work, we present Rose-SQL, a training-free framework that leverages small-scale LRMs through in-context learning to enable accurate context-dependent parsing. We introduce the Role-State, a fine-grained representation that bridges the structural gap between schema linking and SQL generation by serving as a structural blueprint. To handle conversational dependencies, Rose-SQL traces the evolution of Role-State through historical context via structural isomorphism checks, guiding the model to infer the possible SQL composition for the current question through verified interaction trajectories. Experiments on the SParC and CoSQL benchmarks show that, within the Qwen3 series, Rose-SQL outperforms in-context learning baselines at the 4B scale and substantially surpasses state-of-the-art fine-tuned models at the 8B and 14B scales, while showing consistent gains on additional reasoning backbones.

Rose-SQL: Role-State Evolution Guided Structured Reasoning for Multi-Turn Text-to-SQL

Sign language translation (SLT) converts continuous sign videos into spoken-language text, yet it remains challenging due to the intrinsic modality mismatch between visual signs and written text, particularly in gloss-free settings. 
Recent SLT systems increasingly adopt CLIP-like Vision-Language pretraining (VLP) for cross-modal alignment, but the random in-batch contrast provides few, batch-dependent negatives and may mislabel semantically similar (or even identical) pairs as negatives, introducing noisy and potentially inconsistent alignment supervision.
In this work, we first conduct a preliminary trajectory-based analysis that tracks negative video-text similarity over training. The results show that only a small subset of negatives exhibits the desired behavior of being consistently pushed away, while the remaining negatives display heterogeneous and often non-decreasing similarity dynamics, suggesting that random in-batch negatives are frequently uninformative for effective alignment.
Inspired by this, we propose Selective Contrastive Learning for SLT (SCL-SLT) with a Pair Selection (PS) strategy. PS scores candidate negatives using similarity dynamics from reference checkpoints and constructs mini-batches via a curriculum that progressively emphasizes more challenging negatives, thereby strengthening contrastive supervision while reducing the influence of noisy or semantically invalid negatives.

Selective Contrastive Learning For Gloss Free Sign Language Translation

Writing effective rebuttals is a high-stakes task that demands more than linguistic fluency, as it requires precise alignment between reviewer intent and manuscript details. Current solutions typically treat this as a direct-to-text generation problem, suffering from hallucination, overlooked critiques, and a lack of verifiable grounding. To address these limitations, we introduce $\texttt{RebuttalAgent}$, the first multi-agents framework that reframes rebuttal generation as an evidence-centric planning task. Our system decomposes complex feedback into atomic concerns and dynamically constructs hybrid contexts by synthesizing compressed summaries with high-fidelity text while integrating an autonomous and on-demand external search module to resolve concerns requiring outside literature. By generating an inspectable response plan before drafting, \textsc{RebuttalAgent} ensures that every argument is explicitly anchored in internal or external evidence. We validate our approach on the proposed $\texttt{RebuttalBench}$ and demonstrate that our pipeline outperforms strong baselines in coverage, faithfulness, and strategic coherence, offering a transparent and controllable assistant for the peer review process. Code will be released.

Paper2Rebuttal: A Multi-Agent Framework for Transparent Author Response Assistance

Emotional Support Conversation requires not only affective expression but also grounded instrumental support to provide trustworthy guidance. However, existing ESC systems and benchmarks largely focus on affective support in text-only settings, overlooking how external tools can enable factual grounding and reduce hallucination in multi-turn emotional support. We introduce **TEA-Bench**, the first interactive benchmark for evaluating tool-augmented agents in ESC, featuring realistic emotional scenarios, an MCP-style tool environment, and process-level metrics that jointly assess the quality and factual grounding of emotional support. Experiments on nine LLMs show that tool augmentation generally improves emotional support quality and reduces hallucination, but the gains are strongly capacity-dependent: stronger models use tools more selectively and effectively, while weaker models benefit only marginally. We further release **TEA-Dialog**, a dataset of tool-enhanced ESC dialogues, and find that supervised fine-tuning improves in-distribution support but generalizes poorly. Our results underscore the importance of tool use in building reliable emotional support agents.

TEA-Bench: A Systematic Benchmarking of Tool-enhanced Emotional Support Dialogue Agent

The rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) is reshaping multimodel models, with speech synthesis being a prominent application. However, existing approaches often underutilize the linguistic intelligence of these models, typically failing to leverage their powerful instruction-following capabilities. This limitation hinders the model's ability to follow text instructions for controllable Text-to-Speech~(TTS). To address this, we propose a new paradigm inspired by operationalism that decouples instruction understanding from speech generation. We introduce BatonVoice, a framework where an LLM acts as a conductor, understanding user instructions and generating a textual plan -- explicit vocal features (e.g., pitch, energy). A separate TTS model, the orchestra, then generates the speech from these features. To realize this component, we develop BatonTTS, a TTS model trained specifically for this task. Our experiments demonstrate that BatonVoice achieves strong performance in controllable and emotional speech synthesis, outperforming strong open- and closed-source baselines. Notably, our approach enables remarkable zero-shot cross-lingual generalization, accurately applying feature control abilities to languages unseen during post-training. This demonstrates that objectifying speech into textual vocal features can more effectively unlock the linguistic intelligence of LLMs.

BatonVoice: An Operationalist Framework for Enhancing Controllable Speech Synthesis with Linguistic Intelligence from LLMs

Diffusion models have introduced a generative paradigm for Named Entity Recognition (NER), formulating the task as refining entity
spans from noise. While promising, our analysis on the ACE2004 dataset reveals a limitation when training with Exponential Moving
Average (EMA): the model performance often peaks at a single inference step (γ = 1) and plateaus or degrades with additional steps. This
suggests that under standard stable training configurations, the model may function primarily as a one-step generator rather than
leveraging the iterative refinement capability characteristic of diffusion models. To address this, we propose an Initializer-Restorer
approach. Instead of initializing the reverse process from random Gaussian noise, we utilize a preliminary set of candidate spans
generated by a standard NER model (e.g., BERT or GLiNER). This allows the diffusion model to start from an informed, diverse prior,
enabling effective iterative restoration. We investigate different training strategies for the restorer and find that a hybrid strategy mixing
ground truth and noisy predictions is essential. Experiments on ACE2004, GENIA, and CleanCoNLL show that our approach improves
performance over the baseline, particularly when multiple restoration steps are employed. For instance, on CleanCoNLL, our method
achieves an F1 score of 94.70%, compared to 93.79% for the baseline. Our code is available at https://github.com/longtrieu-ai/
Initializer-Restorer-NER.

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