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Hallucinated object mentions remain a persistent failure mode of vision–language models (VLMs) across generation tasks such as image captioning and visual question answering: outputs may be fluent yet include entities not supported by visual evidence. Existing mitigation approaches often reduce hallucinations at the cost of degraded generation quality or require expensive retraining and task-specific supervision. We introduce CEBC, a lightweight, training-free framework for low-hallucination vision–language generation based on conformal evidence-bounded minimal editing. CEBC first produces a strong base output (via greedy decoding or best-of-K sampling), then applies an evidence-bounded editing step that minimally revises or suppresses unsupported object mentions using constraints derived from an external visual detector. Crucially, the evidence threshold is conformally calibrated on a small held-out set via quantiles of detector confidence scores, enabling explicit and controllable hallucination risk at test time.

To balance factuality and informativeness, we further introduce a risk-first, quality-aware selection rule that prioritizes evidence-consistent generations while regularizing unnecessary length or lexical drift. Extensive experiments on MS-COCO and GQA for image captioning, and POPE for VQA evaluation across multiple VLMs demonstrate that CEBC consistently reduces hallucination rates(CHAIR_S, CHAIR_I, POPE) while maintaining or improving standard generation quality metrics (CIDEr, BLEU, CLIPScore). CEBC establishes a stronger factuality–quality Pareto frontier without any additional model training or access to paired supervision beyond an off-the-shelf detector.

ACL 2026

CEBC: Conformal Evidence-Bounded Control for Low-Hallucination Vision–Language Generation

**Welcome to EMNLP 2023!**

On behalf of the EMNLP 2023 Organizing Committee, I extend a warm and heartfelt welcome to all of you to the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). It is with immense pleasure and excitement that we gather here in Singapore, a vibrant hub of innovation and technological advancement.

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EMNLP 2023

EMNLP 2023 took place in Singapore from Dec 6th to Dec 10th, 2023.

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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Speculative decoding has emerged as a promising paradigm for accelerating large language model inference by leveraging a lightweight draft model to generate multiple candidate tokens. However, existing methods often incur substantial training overhead to mitigate information misalignment between autoregressive draft model training and decoding. To address this challenge, we propose EDSD, an Entropy-Driven Speculative Decoding framework that uses entropy as a unified, interpretable signal for both draft model training and architectural design. EDSD drives the draft model to progressively align with the target model in an easy-to-hard manner while establishing token-level alignment as a dominant design principle. Extensive experiments on seven LLMs demonstrate that EDSD improves training efficiency by 24.8%, increases the average acceptance length by 4.0%, and achieves a 4.1% speedup compared to state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, EDSD improves robustness to system prompt variations by more than 5x. Our findings establish entropy-driven alignment as an effective and principled foundation for efficient speculative decoding.

EDSD: Entropy-Driven Design for Faster Speculative Decoding

With the growing popularity of virtual character platforms like Character.AI, users are increasingly turning to role-playing agents for emotional support in daily life. Yet existing research mainly focuses on character consistency in fictional or game-based scenarios, overlooking user-centered interactions such as companionship and psychological support. To bridge this gap, we propose Emotionally Supportive Role-Playing (ESRP), a framework designed to align role-playing with real-world user scenarios and emotional needs. We focus on typical users of these platforms, i.e., anime enthusiasts—including students, office workers, freelancers, and self-employed individuals—and design scenario-based questions that reflect their everyday struggles such as work stress and social loneliness. Through a two-round data collection involving 40 anime fans and 10 Large Language Models (LLMs), we build ChatAnime: the first ESRP dataset with 2,400 human-written and 24,000 LLM-generated responses, supported by over 132,000 fine-grained human annotations. We also provide the ESRP evaluation framework featuring 9 fine-grained metrics across three dimensions: basic dialogue, role-playing and emotional support, along with an overall metric for diversity. Experimental results under our evaluation setting show that top-performing LLMs surpass anime fans in role-playing and emotional support, while humans still lead in diversity.

ChatAnime: Towards User-Centered Emotional Support in LLM-based Virtual Character Chat

Unsupervised representation learning using masked language modeling on the language of life has transformed protein research, enabling the analysis of a protein universe that is expanding at an exponential pace. However, most current models rely solely on sequence data, overlooking decades of expert-curated biological knowledge stored in natural language. While recent multimodal and knowledge-graph-based approaches attempt to bridge this gap, they often rely on shallow functional labels that lack the contextual depth of full textual narratives. We present Protein-STORY, a general pipeline that synthesizes protein embeddings from diverse, multi-source text descriptions. At the core of our approach is a novel network architecture designed for the semantic compression of multi document embeddings, which integrates high-fidelity functional and structural insights into a unified representation. Our experiments demonstrate that Protein-STORY produces biologically meaningful embeddings ($r \approx 0.75$) that outperform existing models on diverse downstream tasks (+2 pts F1 in function prediction). Furthermore, by projecting the story of a protein into a natural language semantic space, our model enables effective zero-shot text-prompted protein search.

Protein-STORY: Semantic Text-Oriented Representation Yields biologically meaningful Protein embeddings

The evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) is shifting the focus from single, verifiable tasks toward complex, open-ended real-world scenarios, imposing significant challenges on the post-training phase. In these settings, the scale and complexity of reward systems have grown significantly, transitioning toward multi-objective formulations that encompass a comprehensive spectrum of model capabilities and application contexts. However, traditional methods typically rely on fixed reward weights, ignoring non-stationary learning dynamics and struggling with data heterogeneity across dimensions. To address these issues, we propose SPARD, a framework that establishes an automated, self-paced curriculum by perceiving learning progress to dynamically adjust multi-objective reward weights and data importance, thereby synchronizing learning intent with data utility for optimal performance. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that SPARD significantly enhances model capabilities across all domains. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/USTC-StarTeam/SPARD.

SPARD: Self-Paced Curriculum for RL Alignment via Integrating Reward Dynamics and Data Utility

The increasing reliance on natural language generation (NLG) models, particularly large language models, has raised concerns about the reliability and accuracy of their outputs. A key challenge is hallucination, where models produce plausible but incorrect information. As a result, hallucination detection has become a critical task. In this work, we introduce a comprehensive hallucination taxonomy with 11 categories across various NLG tasks and propose the HAllucination Detection (HAD) models, which integrate hallucination detection, span-level identification, and correction into a single inference process. Trained on an elaborate synthetic dataset of about 90K samples, our HAD models are versatile and can be applied to various NLG tasks. We also carefully annotate a test set for hallucination detection, called HADTest, which contains 2,248 samples. Evaluations on in-domain and out-of-domain test sets show that our HAD models generally outperform the existing baselines, achieving state-of-the-art results on HaluEval, FactCHD, and FaithBench, confirming their robustness and versatility.

HAD: HAllucination Detection Language Models Based on a Comprehensive Hallucination Taxonomy

Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely used for code generation, but their performance degrades on tasks requiring multi-step logical reasoning. In practice, reliability is often improved through multi-sample inference, but its cost grows linearly with the sample size, making it impractical under strict latency constraints. To address these constraints, we propose Reason-Code, an inference-time framework that formulates code generation as a search process guided by execution feedback. This system integrates Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) with a lightweight execution sandbox, where candidate programs are evaluated via unit tests. To control inference cost, Reason-Code adopts a conditional budgeting strategy that activates search only when greedy generation fails. While Best-of-$N$ sampling can improve accuracy, its inference cost grows linearly with $N$, making it impractical under strict latency budgets. Experiments on HumanEval and MBPP show that Reason-Code matches strong sampling baselines with lower token cost and no regression, while UCB-guided exploration outperforms random search under the same budget.

Reason-Code: Reliable Code Generation via Test-Driven Monte Carlo Tree Search

We deploy large language models (LLMs) as business development (BD) agents for persuasive price negotiation in online travel agencies (OTAs). The agent must follow a multi-stage Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) and strict guardrails (no over-promising and no hallucinations), while remaining human-like and effective over long, multi-turn dialogues.
We propose Reward-Enhanced Policy Optimization (REPO), a reinforcement learning post-training method that combines heterogeneous rewards: a preference-trained reward model (RM), an LLM-as-a-judge (RJ) for nuanced behaviors (e.g., emotional value and SOP compliance), and rule-based reward functions (RF) (mainly regex-based) for deterministic checks on numerics, formatting, and guardrails.In expert consensus evaluation (three human experts; 30 online conversations and 45 curated bad cases), REPO improves average dialogue rating to 4.63 (+0.33 over GRPO) and raises the share of conversations with at least one excellent response to 66.67\% (+23.34 pp over GRPO), while achieving a 93.33\% bad-case fix rate with 75.56\% clean fixes.
In a production A/B test on 9{,}653 real customer conversations (vs.\ an intent-driven dialogue system), REPO improves response rate by +12.14 pp and task success rate by +5.94 pp ($p<0.001$).

Teaching LLM to be Persuasive: Reward-Enhanced Policy Optimization for Alignment from Heterogeneous Rewards

We introduce anonym-embed, a family of multilingual embedding models that employ multi-stage contrastive learning on a diffusion-pretrained language model backbone for web-scale retrieval.
By leveraging bidirectional attention through diffusion-based pretraining, our models capture comprehensive bidirectional context within passages, enabling the use of mean pooling to better preserve global context across long documents.
We release anonym-embed-v1 for standard retrieval, and anonym-embed-context-v1 for contextualized embeddings that incorporate global document context into passage representations.
anonym-embed-v1 achieves competitive performance on the MTEB(Multilingual, v2), MTEB(Code), BERGEN, and ToolRet retrieval benchmarks, while anonym-embed-context-v1 sets new records on the ConTEB benchmark.

Diffusion-Pretrained Dense and Contextual Embeddings

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a key component in industrial information extraction pipelines, where systems must satisfy strict latency and throughput constraints in addition to strong accuracy. State-of-the-art NER accuracy is often achieved by span-based frameworks, which construct span representations from token encodings and classify candidate spans. However, many span-based methods enumerate large numbers of candidates and process each candidate with marker-augmented inputs, substantially increasing inference cost and limiting scalability in large-scale deployments. 
In this work, we propose SpanDec, an efficient span-based NER framework that targets this bottleneck. Our main insight is that span representation interactions can be computed effectively at the final transformer stage, avoiding redundant computation in earlier layers via a lightweight decoder dedicated to span representations. We further introduce a span filtering mechanism during enumeration to prune unlikely candidates before expensive processing. Across multiple benchmarks, SpanDec matches competitive span-based baselines while improving throughput and reducing computational cost, yielding a better accuracy--efficiency trade-off suitable for high-volume serving and on-device applications.

Decoding Text Spans for Efficient and Accurate Named-Entity Recognition

Adapting Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) to specialized domains typically demands resource-intensive fine-tuning or access to proprietary parameters (``white-box'' access). While decoding-time strategies like Proxy Tuning offer a parameter-efficient alternative, they rely on rigid, static logit arithmetic that fails to account for instance-specific variations in model certainty and domain shift. In this work, we introduce Adaptive Weighted Proxy Tuning (AWPT), a gray-box steering framework that dynamically modulates the logit contributions of a large base model, a fine-tuned expert, and an untuned anti-expert. Unlike static approaches, AWPT introduces two instance-aware mechanisms: (1) a lightweight ViT-based Weight Predictor that performs amortized inference to estimate optimal mixing coefficients in real-time with negligible added latency ($\sim$0.03s overhead), and (2) a Per-Sample Optimization objective that establishes theoretical performance bounds via gradient-based logit steering. Extensive evaluation across medical (ROCOv2, IU-Xray) and general domains (Flickr30k, MS COCO, TextCaps) demonstrates that AWPT achieves performance parity with fully fine-tuned models while remaining parameter-free regarding the generator. Crucially, our dynamic weighting acts as an effective regularizer, significantly reducing object hallucinations and establishing AWPT as a robust solution for deploying general-purpose LVLMs in safety-critical contexts.

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EDSD: Entropy-Driven Design for Faster Speculative Decoding

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