United States

While advertising is a cornerstone of commercial growth, it is constrained by online violation detection systems that reject non-compliant content at a million-scale daily. 
Advertisers urgently require automated solutions to rectify these advertisements, especially visual ads, as manual fixing is unscalable. 
Although recent safety-driven methods can achieve compliance, they typically suffer from over-editing, destroying the original commercial intent and perceptual similarity.
To address this, we present SSR-A, a framework tailored for the minimalist rectification of non-compliant image ads.
Instead of fine-tuning image editing models directly, SSR-A focuses on translating violation policies into targeted editing instructions.
We first introduce a Spatial- and Semantic-Aware Instruction Synthesis Pipeline, where MLLMs synthesize candidate instructions—incorporating spatial grounding and semantic guidance—and select the optimal instruction via multi-dimensional evaluation. 
Furthermore, we align the model using Curriculum Reinforcement Learning, employing GRPO with multi-faceted rewards to progressively navigate the trade-off between compliance and visual preservation. 
Extensive experiments and online A/B tests show that SSR-A significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both compliance and preservation of visual and commercial consistency.

ACL 2026

SSR-A: Spatial- and Semantic-Aware Instructions and Curriculum Reinforcement for Advertisement Compliant Rectification

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>
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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.

technical paper

In cross-cultural recipe adaptation, the goal is not only to ensure cultural appropriateness and retain the original dish’s essence, but also to provide diverse options for various dietary needs and preferences. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is a promising approach, combining the retrieval of real recipes from the target cuisine for cultural adaptability with large language models (LLMs) for relevance. However, it remains unclear whether RAG can generate diverse adaptation results. Our analysis shows that RAG tends to overly rely on a limited portion of the context across generations, failing to produce diverse outputs even when provided with varied contextual inputs. This reveals a key limitation of RAG in creative tasks with multiple valid answers: it fails to leverage contextual diversity for generating varied responses. To address this issue, we propose CARRIAGE, A plug-and-play RAG framework for cross-cultural recipe adaptation that enhances diversity in both retrieval and context organization. To our knowledge, this is the first RAG framework that explicitly aims to generate highly diverse outputs to accommodate multiple user preferences. Our experiments show that CARRIAGE achieves Pareto efficiency in terms of diversity and quality of recipe adaptation compared to closed-book LLMs.

Culinary Crossroads: A RAG Framework for Enhancing Diversity in Cross-Cultural Recipe Adaptation

Effective long-term memory management is crucial for language models handling extended contexts. We introduce the Enhanced Ranked Memory Augmented Retrieval ERMAR framework, which dynamically ranks memory entries based on relevance. Unlike prior models, ERMAR employs a novel relevance scoring mechanism and a pointwise re-ranking model for key-value embeddings, inspired by learning-to-rank techniques in information retrieval. By integrating historical usage patterns and adaptive retrieval, ERMAR achieves state-of-the-art results on standard benchmarks, demonstrating superior scalability and performance in long-context tasks.

Long Context Modeling with Ranked Memory-Augmented Retrieval

Accurate comprehension and controllable generation of emotion and rhetoric are pivotal for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). Existing studies mostly rely on external optimizations, lacking in-depth exploration of internal representation mechanisms, thus failing to achieve fine-grained steering at the neuron level. A handful of works on neurons are confined to emotions, neglecting rhetoric neurons and their intrinsic connections. Traditional neuron masking also exhibits counterintuitive phenomena, making reliable verification of neuron functionality infeasible. To address these issues, we systematically investigate the neurons representation mechanisms and inherent associations of 6 emotion categories and 4 core rhetorical devices. We propose a neuron identification framework that integrates multi-dimensional screening, and design an adaptive masking method incorporating dynamic filtering, attenuation masking, and feedback optimization, enabling reliable functional validation of neuron functionality. Through neuron regulation, we achieve directed induction of non-target sentences and enhancement of emotion tasks via rhetoric neurons. Experiments on 5 commonly used datasets validate the effectiveness of our method, providing a novel paradigm for the fine-grained steering of emotion and rhetoric expressions in LLMs.

Are Emotion and Rhetoric Neurons in LLM? Neuron Recognition and Adaptive Masking for Emotion-Rhetoric Prediction Steering

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved high accuracy on complex commonsense and mathematical problems that involve the composition of multiple reasoning steps. However, current compositional benchmarks testing these skills tend to focus on *either* commonsense or math reasoning, whereas LLM agents solving real-world tasks would require a combination of *both*. In this work, we introduce an **Agent**ic **Co**mmonsense and **Ma**th benchmark (AgentCoMa), where each compositional task requires a commonsense reasoning step *and* a math reasoning step. We test it on 61 LLMs of different sizes, model families, and training strategies. We find that LLMs can usually solve both steps in isolation, yet their accuracy drops by nearly 30% on average when the two are combined. This is a substantially greater performance gap than the one we observe in prior compositional benchmarks that combine multiple steps of the same reasoning type. In contrast, non-expert human annotators can solve the compositional questions and the individual steps in AgentCoMa with similarly high accuracy. Furthermore, we conduct a series of interpretability studies to better understand the performance gap, examining neuron patterns, attention maps and membership inference. Our work underscores a substantial degree of model brittleness in the context of mixed-type compositional reasoning and offers a test bed for future improvement.

AgentCoMa: A Compositional Benchmark Mixing Commonsense and Mathematical Reasoning in Real-World Scenarios

Table Question Answering (TableQA) benefits significantly from table pruning, which extracts compact sub-tables by eliminating redundant cells to streamline downstream reasoning. However, existing pruning methods typically rely on sequential revisions driven by unreliable critique signals, often failing to detect the loss of answer-critical data. To address this limitation, we propose TabTrim, a novel table pruning framework which transforms table pruning from sequential revisions to gold trajectory-supervised parallel search. TabTrim derives a gold pruning trajectory using the intermediate sub-tables in the execution process of gold SQL queries, and trains a pruner and a verifier to make the step-wise pruning result align with the gold pruning trajectory. During inference, TabTrim performs parallel search to explore multiple candidate pruning trajectories and identify the optimal sub-table. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TabTrim achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse tabular reasoning tasks: TabTrim-8B reaches 73.5% average accuracy, outperforming the strongest baseline by 3.2%, including 79.4% on WikiTQ and 61.2% on TableBench.

Rethinking Table Pruning in TableQA: From Sequential Revisions to Gold Trajectory-Supervised Parallel Search

Tokenization is the first step in every language model (LM), yet it never takes the sounds of words into account. We investigate how tokenization influences text-only LMs' ability to represent phonological knowledge.
Through a series of probing experiments, we show that subword-based tokenization systematically weakens the encoding of both local (e.g., rhyme) and global (e.g., syllabification) phonological features.
To quantify this effect, we introduce the syllabification-tokenization alignment distance (STAD), a metric that measures the misalignment between a model's tokenization and the natural syllable boundaries of words, and find that higher misalignment correlates with poorer phonological representations, providing a simple diagnostic for phonology-aware tokenization.
To address these limitations, we propose a lightweight IPA-based fine-tuning method that infuses phonological awareness into LMs, leading to consistent improvements across three phonology-related tasks while largely preserving math and general reasoning ability, with 1.1\% and 0.9\% drops on GSM8K and MMLU, respectively.\footnote{Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/liaodisen/Tokenization-Phonology}}

How Tokenization Limits Phonological Knowledge Representation in Language Models and How to Improve Them

Multi-agent debate has been shown to improve reasoning in large language models (LLMs). However, it is compute-intensive, requiring generation of long transcripts before answering questions. To address this inefficiency, we develop a framework that distills multi-agent debate into a single LLM through a two-stage fine-tuning pipeline combining debate structure learning with internalization via dynamic reward scheduling and length clipping. Across multiple models and benchmarks, our internalized models match or exceed explicit multi-agent debate performance using up to 93% fewer tokens. We then investigate the mechanistic basis of this capability through activation steering, finding that internalization creates agent-specific subspaces: interpretable directions in activation space corresponding to different agent perspectives. We further demonstrate a practical application: by instilling malicious agents into the LLM through internalized debate, then applying negative steering to suppress them, we show that distillation makes harmful behaviors easier to localize and control with smaller reductions in general performance compared to steering base models. Our findings offer a new perspective for understanding multi-agent capabilities in distilled models and provide practical guidelines for controlling internalized reasoning behaviors.

Latent Agents: A Post-Training Procedure for Internalized Multi-Agent Debate

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly adept at solving complex problems, such as mathematical reasoning and automatic evaluation. However, performance often degrades when prompts intertwine task instructions with rigid formatting requirements. This entanglement creates competing goals for the model, hindering its reasoning capabilities. To address this, we introduce Deco-G, a decoding framework that explicitly decouples format adherence from problem solving. Deco-G delegates format adherence to a separate Format Estimation Module (FEM), which performs probabilistic lookahead to estimate future format compliance rate and reweighs token probabilities, allowing the LLM to focus solely on task resolution. To make this approach both practical and efficient, we introduce three key innovations: instruction-aware distillation, a flexible trie-building algorithm, and HMM state pruning. Experiments across mathematical reasoning, event argument extraction, and LLM-as-a-judge demonstrate that Deco-G constantly gains over prompting or structured generation baselines, with guaranteed format compliance.

Decoupling Task-Solving and Output Formatting in LLM Generation

Recent advancements have expanded the role of Large Language Models (LLMs) in board games from playing agents to creative co-designers. However, a critical gap remains: current systems lack the capacity to offer constructive critique grounded in the emergent user experience. Bridging this gap is fundamental for harmonizing Human-AI collaboration, as it empowers designers to refine their creations via external perspectives while steering models away from biased or unpredictable outcomes. Automating this evaluation presents two challenges: inferring the latent dynamics connecting static rules to gameplay without an explicit engine, and modeling the subjective heterogeneity of diverse player groups. To address these, we curate a comprehensive dataset of 1,727 structurally corrected rulebooks and 150K reviews selected via rigorous quality scoring and facet-aware sampling. We augment this data with Mechanics-Dynamics-Aesthetics (MDA) reasoning to explicitly bridge the causal gap between written rules and player experience. We further distill distinct player personas and introduce MeepleLM, a specialized model that internalizes persona-specific reasoning patterns to accurately simulate the subjective feedback of diverse player archetypes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MeepleLM significantly outperforms latest commercial models (e.g., GPT-5.1, Gemini3-Pro) in community alignment and critique quality, achieving a 70% preference rate in user studies assessing practical utility. MeepleLM serves as a reliable virtual playtester that provides experience-grounded feedback, offering a practical step towards audience-aligned Human-AI collaboration.

MeepleLM: A Virtual Playtester Simulating Diverse Subjective Experiences

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) perform well on general multimodal tasks, yet applying them to real-world advertisement (ad) evaluation is challenging due to strong brand specificity and limited labeled data. We introduce a new practical task, brand-specific ad ranking, which aims to rank ads for a target brand prior to deployment by modeling brand-specific effectiveness. To this end, we propose ADvisor, which derives explicit brand-aware decision criteria using VLMs, augments limited brand context with ads from similar brands, and applies reflection-based scoring for ranking. Experiments on real-world advertising data from 10 brands, collected through actual ad campaigns, show that ADvisor outperforms strong baselines by up to 7.2%. Further analyses show the generated criteria capture meaningful brand specificity, and ADvisor also performs strongly in online A/B testing. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ADvisor-2C0C/.

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Culinary Crossroads: A RAG Framework for Enhancing Diversity in Cross-Cultural Recipe Adaptation

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$\mathcal{R}^3$: Advertisement Compliance $\mathcal{R}$ectification via Group-$\mathcal{R}$elative Experience Extractor and Curriculum $\mathcal{R}$einforcement