United States

Visual segmentation, the task of segmenting an image into semantically meaningful regions, is a cornerstone in machine learning and has widespread applications in industry. Nevertheless, visual segmentation with instruction has been a challenging task for many years. This largely stems from the cross-modal discrepancy between language and image domains, resulting in difficulty in relating the instruction semantics and the pixel-level predictions. In recent years, the remarkable reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have spurred a new wave of research aiming to bridge the disparity between natural language instructions and pixel-level understanding. This survey offers the first comprehensive overview of the rapidly evolving field of LLM-driven visual segmentation. We categorize existing approaches based on their core objectives and methodologies, including reasoning-based segmentation, open-vocabulary segmentation, grounding techniques connecting language to pixels, and extensions to video domains. We review recent seminal works in LLM-based visual segmentation, analyzing their architectural innovations, training strategies, and benchmark performance. Furthermore, we discuss the common datasets, evaluation metrics, and identify key challenges and promising future directions at the intersection of language and visual segmentation. We hope this survey serves as a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners seeking to understand the current landscape and future directions of leveraging LLMs for sophisticated visual segmentation tasks and applications. The resource summary is available at https://github.com/wyzjack/Awesome-LLM-Visual-Segmentation.

ACL 2026

From Words to Pixels: A Comprehensive Survey on Large Language Models in Visual Segmentation

We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-26 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.

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AAAI 2026

We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

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

Automated red-teaming has emerged as a scalable approach for auditing Large Language Models (LLMs) prior to deployment, yet existing approaches lack mechanisms to efficiently adapt to model-specific vulnerabilities at inference. We introduce Red-Bandit, a red-teaming framework that adapts online to identify and exploit model failure modes under distinct attack styles (e.g., manipulation, slang). Red-Bandit post-trains a set of parameter-efficient LoRA experts, each specialized for a particular attack style, using reinforcement learning that rewards the generation of unsafe prompts via a rule-based safety model. At inference, a multi-armed bandit policy dynamically selects among these attack-style experts based on the target model’s response safety, balancing exploration and exploitation. Red-Bandit outperforms state-of-the-art methods on AdvBench and HarmBench, achieving higher attack success rates under sufficient exploration budgets (ASR@10), while generating more human-readable adversarial prompts (lower perplexity). In addition, Red-Bandit’s bandit policy serves as a diagnostic tool for identifying model-specific vulnerabilities by indicating which attack styles most effectively elicit harmful behaviors.

 Red-Bandit: Test-Time Adaptation for LLM Red-Teaming via Bandit-Guided LoRA Experts

The advent of always-on personal AI assistants, enabled by all-day wearable devices such as smart glasses, demands a new level of contextual understanding—one that goes beyond short, isolated events to encompass the continuous, longitudinal stream of egocentric video. Achieving this vision requires advances in long-horizon video understanding, where systems must interpret and recall visual and audio information spanning days or even weeks. Existing methods, including large language models and retrieval-augmented generation, are constrained by limited context windows and lack the ability to perform compositional, multi-hop reasoning over very long video streams. In this work, we address these challenges through EGAgent, an enhanced agentic framework centered on entity scene graphs, which represent people, places, objects, and their relationships over time. Our system equips a planning agent with tools for structured search and reasoning over these graphs, as well as hybrid visual and audio search capabilities, enabling detailed, cross-modal, and temporally coherent reasoning. Experiments on the EgoLifeQA and Video-MME-long datasets show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on EgoLifeQA (57.5%) and competitive performance on Video-MME-long (74.1%) for complex longitudinal video understanding tasks.

Agentic Very Long Video Understanding

Multimodal Reasoning Models (MRMs) leveraging Chain-of-Though (CoT) based thinking have revolutionized mathematical and logical problem-solving. However, we show that this paradigm struggles with generalized spatial intelligence. We perform a comprehensive evaluation of sixteen models across thirteen spatial benchmarks and identify a critical gap: CoT prompting consistently degrades performance in visual spatial reasoning. Furthermore, through a novel No-Image++ ablation, we demonstrate that MRMs and CoT prompted MLMs suffer from severe shortcut learning, and hallucinate visual details from textual priors even when the image is absent. These findings challenge the efficacy of text-only CoT for spatial tasks and underscore the need for vision-centric reasoning paradigms.

Chain-of-Thought Degrades Visual Spatial Reasoning Capabilities of Multimodal LLMs

Causal explanations in political narratives are often framed and contested. Different sources may explain the same event by assigning responsibility to different actors and expressing varying levels of certainty. Standard Event Causality Identification (ECI) focuses on detecting causal links and does not capture these distinctions. We introduce Framing-Aware Event Causality Identification (FrECI), a framing-aware extension of ECI that models causal explanations as structured claims including responsibility targets, evaluative framing, source type, and epistemic modality grounded in established framing theories. We construct a multilingual dataset aligned across English, Chinese, and Arabic narratives using shared event anchors. We evaluate FrECI using prompt-based large language model baselines and supervised neural models. Results show that prompt-based baselines struggle to recover complete framed causal claims, while joint supervised models perform substantially better. Finally, we demonstrate that FrECI enables quantitative analysis of divergent causal attribution across narratives.

Reframing Responsibility: Framing-Aware Event Causality Identification

Evaluating the quality of tables generated by large language models (LLMs) remains an open challenge: existing metrics either flatten tables into text, ignoring structure, or rely on fixed references that limit generalization. We present TabReX, a reference-less, property-driven framework for evaluating tabular generation via graph-based reasoning. TabReX converts both source text and generated tables into canonical knowledge graphs, aligns them through an LLM-guided matching process, and computes interpretable, rubric-aware scores that quantify structural and factual fidelity. The resulting metric provides controllable trade-offs between sensitivity and specificity, yielding human-aligned judgments and cell-level error traces. To systematically asses metric robustness, we introduce TabReX-Bench, a large-scale benchmark spanning six domains and twelve planner-driven perturbation types across three difficulty tiers. Empirical results show that TabReX achieves the highest correlation with expert rankings, remains stable under harder perturbations, and enables fine-grained model-vs-prompt analysis establishing a new paradigm for trustworthy, explainable evaluation of structured generation systems.

TabReX: Tabular Referenceless eXplainable Evaluation

Understanding what kinds of factual knowledge large language models (LLMs) memorize is essential for evaluating their reliability and limitations.
Entity-based QA is a common framework for analyzing non-verbatim memorization, but typical evaluations query each entity using a single canonical surface form, making it difficult to disentangle fact memorization from access through a particular name.
We introduce RedirectQA, an entity-based QA dataset that uses Wikipedia redirect information to associate Wikidata factual triples with categorized surface forms for each entity, including alternative names, abbreviations, spelling variants, and common erroneous forms.
Across 13 LLMs, we examine surface-conditioned factual memorization and find that prediction outcomes often change when only the entity surface form changes.
This inconsistency is category-dependent: models are more robust to minor orthographic variations than to larger lexical variations such as aliases and abbreviations.
Frequency analyses further suggest that both entity- and surface-level frequencies are associated with accuracy, and that entity frequency often contributes beyond surface frequency.
Overall, factual memorization appears neither purely surface-specific nor fully surface-invariant, highlighting the importance of surface-form diversity in evaluating non-verbatim memorization.

Revisiting Non-Verbatim Memorization in Large Language Models: The Role of Entity Surface Forms

Agentic benchmarks increasingly rely on LLM-simulated users to scalably evaluate agent performance, yet the robustness, validity, and fairness of this approach remain unexamined. Through a user study with participants across the United States, India, Kenya, and Nigeria, we investigate whether LLM-simulated users serve as reliable proxies for real human users in evaluating agents on τ-Bench retail tasks. We find that user simulators lack robustness, with agent success rates varying up to 9 percentage points across different user LLMs. Furthermore, simulated users systematically miscalibrate performance, underestimating success on challenging tasks while overestimating moderately difficult ones. African American Vernacular English (AAVE) speakers experience consistently worse success rates and calibration errors than Standard American English (SAE) speakers, with disparities compounding significantly with age. We also find simulated users to be a differentially effective proxy for different populations, performing worst for AAVE and Indian English. Additionally, simulated users introduce conversational artifacts and surface different failure patterns than human users. These findings demonstrate that current evaluation practices risk misrepresenting agent capabilities across diverse user populations and may obscure real-world deployment challenges.

Lost in Simulation: LLM-Simulated Users are Unreliable Proxies for Human Users in Agentic Evaluations

A standard method for evaluating grammatical error correction systems severely underestimates performance, as it compares outputs
against a small, fixed set of human references, despite the large space of possible valid corrections. Prior research has shown that using a
closest-gold reference – i.e., a human reference generated with respect to the system output rather than the original text – yields more accurate performance estimates. Yet, producing such references for each system individually is costly. We introduce an automated method for generating closest-gold references by prompting a large language model (LLM) with system outputs. We find that performance scores computed using automatic closest-gold references correlate well with human closest-golds, whereas standard reference-based evaluations show weak or no correlation.

Building on this insight, we use both fixed human references and closest-gold references generated by Claude and Llama to compare the
performance of supervised models and GPT-4 across 14 benchmarks spanning 12 languages. Consequently, while prior work has shown that GPT-4 appears to lag behind traditional models, we demonstrate that this is due to the failures of the standard evaluation method that systematically underestimates GPT-4 performance more severely than that of supervised models. We show that a more appropriate evaluation approach, based on the closest gold method, reveals that GPT-4 outperforms traditional state-of- the-art models on almost all languages.

Toward Robust Evaluation for Multilingual Grammatical Error Correction: Can Large Language Models Replace Human References?

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a crucial technique for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. However, existing RLHF methods face key challenges, including poor sample efficiency, high computational overhead, and slow convergence. Recent studies highlight the importance of data selection in RL, but how to effectively select the most beneficial experiences for RL training remains an open problem. Existing data selection methods for RL rely on heuristic metrics, failing to establish an interpretable connection between data and optimization objectives. To address this problem, we propose InfOES (Influence-based Online Experience Selection), a novel data selection method for RLHF that dynamically estimates the influence of individual training samples on policy optimization. By incorporating data attribution into the policy gradient, InfOES can identify and filter out detrimental samples on the fly, ensuring effective convergence toward alignment objectives. Our approach is compatible with various RL algorithms (e.g., PPO, GRPO, REINFORCE++). Extensive experiments demonstrate that InfOES significantly enhances training effectiveness, achieving superior alignment performance with fewer optimization steps.

 Influence-based Online Experience Selection for Effective RLHF

How can we share parameters within large language models to significantly reduce memory costs while preserving accuracy? While parameter sharing is a promising solution to the memory overhead of large language models, existing methods rely on naive grouping and fail to correct sharing-induced discrepancies. We propose an accurate and efficient parameter sharing framework, SharVeT (Similarity-aware sharing with Vector-based Tuning), which performs similarity-based grouping to ensure accurate sharing, allocates parameters adaptively to preserve diversity within each group, and applies lightweight refinement with knowledge distillation to correct sharing-induced discrepancies. Experiments show that SharVeT outperforms existing sharing methods, achieving up to 32.1% lower perplexity and 23.3% higher few-shot reasoning accuracy.

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