United States

With the advancement of vision-language models, web automation has made significant progress. However, deploying autonomous agents in real-world settings remains challenging, primarily due to site heterogeneity, where generalist models lack domain-specific priors for diverse interfaces, and long-horizon instability, characterized by the accumulation of decision drift over extended interactions. To address these challenges, we introduce ColorBrowserAgent (Complex Long-Horizon Browser Agent), a knowledge-evolving agent for robust web automation. Our approach addresses these challenges through two synergistic mechanisms: human-in-the-loop knowledge adaptation that transforms sparse human feedback into reusable domain knowledge, and knowledge-aligned progressive summarization that stabilizes long interactions through memory compression. Extensive experiments on WebArena, WebChoreArena and industrial deployment show that ColorBrowserAgent consistently outperforms strong baselines. It achieves a state-of-the-art success rate of 71.2% on WebArena and maintains 47.4% performance under zero-shot transfer setting on WebChoreArena. In commercial deployment, it improves user satisfaction by 19.3% relatively, verifying its robustness in real-world scenarios.

ACL 2026

ColorBrowserAgent: Complex Long-Horizon Browser Agent with Adaptive Knowledge Evolution

We are pleased to announce the Thirty-Ninth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-25), which will be held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania at the Pennsylvania Convention Center from February 25 to March 4, 2025.

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-25 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.

### [Invited Speakers](https://aaai.org/conference/aaai/aaai-25/aaai-25-invited-speakers/)

Register [here](https://aaai.org/conference/aaai/aaai-25/registration/)

AAAI 2025

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-25 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.



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.

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.

As LLMs scale, low-bit floating-point formats like MXFP and NVFP4 offer new opportunities for precision and efficiency. In this work, we evaluate HiFloat (HiF8 and HiF4), a family of formats tailored for Ascend NPUs. Through rigorous comparison across weight-activation and KV-cache tasks, we provide three key insights: (1) INT8 suits narrow-range data, while floating-point formats excel with high-variance data; (2) in 4-bit regimes, HiF4’s hierarchical scaling prevents the accuracy collapse seen in integer formats; and (3) HiFloat is fully compatible with state-of-the-art post-training quantization frameworks. Overall, HiFloat provides a solution for high-efficiency LLM inference on NPUs.

Unleashing Low-Bit Inference on Ascend NPUs: A Comprehensive Evaluation of HiFloat Formats

Credit risk models suffer from rapid performance decay due to distribution shifts, requiring frequent updates to meet strict operational guardrails. However, manual refreshing takes weeks of trial-and-error across upstream data engineering and downstream training. We present ACRM, a deployed multi-agent framework that automates the end-to-end credit modeling workflow by treating it as a learnable trajectory of agent interactions. Unlike AutoML, which optimizes hyperparameters on fixed datasets, ACRM's action space extends to upstream data semantics---cohort selection, observation windowing, feature screening---where the majority of performance recovery occurs. A central Orchestrator coordinates specialist agents through a three-stream decision stack: rule-based safety guardrails, retrieval-augmented grounding from historical workflows, and preference alignment via DPO on expert-labeled trajectories. Deployed at a major fintech institution for three months across six business scenarios, ACRM reduced the average model refresh cycle from weeks to 1.1 days and iteration rounds by 65%, while maintaining superior stability metrics.

ACRM: Multi-Agent Trajectory Learning for Automated Credit Risk Model Refreshing in Production

The whole-page reranking integrates retrieval results from multiple modalities and is critical for user experience of search engines, yet it requires costly large-scale expert annotations due to the complexity of assessing cross-modal relevances. In this paper, we propose SMAR, a novel whole-page reranking framework that converts single-modal rankers into page-level guidance by constructing budget-aware candidates for cross modal annotations and distilling intra-modality preferences to align relevance scales across modalities. Specifically, we use pre-trained single-modal rankers to construct candidate pages for limited cross-modal annotation at the page level. The whole-page reranker is then trained on these samples, enforcing consistency with single-modal preferences to preserve intra-modal ranking quality. Experiments on the Qilin and CrossRank datasets demonstrate that SMAR reduces annotation costs by 70-90\% while outperforming the fully-annotated reranking baselines. Further offline and online A/B tests confirm significant gains in both ranking metrics and user experience, validating the effectiveness and practical value of our approach in real-world search scenarios.

An Efficient Framework for Whole-Page Reranking via Single-Modal Supervision

In subscription-based businesses, understanding why a customer intends to churn is as vital as the classification itself. We present a case study at a major Dutch telecommunications provider, where we implement Text Bottleneck Models (TBMs) for post-call churn classification. The TBM distills dialogues into a sparse set of human-interpretable concepts and provides faithful, snippet-based evidence for every decision. We show that the TBM performs competitively with black-box baselines and demonstrate potential business impact via automated call profiling and an interactive stakeholder dashboard. Our work demonstrates that the perceived trade-off between interpretability and predictive performance can be bridged, providing the high-accuracy evidence needed for industrial retention strategies.

Actionable Interpretability for Churn Classification: A Text Bottleneck Model Case Study at a Major Telecom Provider

As a primary medium for human interaction and information exchange, social networking services (SNS) present distinct challenges for large language models (LLMs): rapidly evolving norms and slang, and culturally diverse content that causes knowledge distribution shift. While supervised fine-tuning (SFT) can improve in-domain performance, it often induces a "seesaw" trade-off with out-of-domain robustness, especially for smaller models. To address these challenges, we present RedOne 2.0, an SNS-oriented LLM developed with a progressive, RL-prioritized post-training paradigm for fast and stable adaptation. Our pipeline has three stages: (1) Exploratory Learning on curated SNS corpora to establish initial alignment and surface systematic weaknesses; (2) Targeted Fine-Tuning that applies SFT only to diagnosed gaps while mixing a small amount of general data to reduce forgetting; and (3) Refinement Learning that re-applies RL with SNS-centric signals to consolidate gains and balance trade-offs across tasks. Across various tasks in three categories, our 4B model improves by 2.41 on average over a sub-optimal 7B baseline. It also yields an 8.74 average gain over the base model while using less than half the data required by the SFT-centric method, demonstrating superior data efficiency and stability at compact scales. Overall, RedOne 2.0 provides a competitive, cost-effective baseline for SNS-specific LLMs, improving capability without sacrificing robustness.

RedOne 2.0: Rethinking Domain-specific LLM Post-Training in Social Networking Services

Enterprise LLM agents can dramatically improve workplace productivity, but their core capability, retrieving and using internal context to act on a user’s behalf, also creates new risks for sensitive information leakage. 
We introduce **CI-Work**, a Contextual Integrity (CI)-grounded benchmark that simulates enterprise workflows across five information-flow directions and evaluates whether agents can convey *essential* content while withholding *sensitive* context in dense retrieval settings.
Our evaluation of frontier models reveals that privacy failures are prevalent (violation rates range from 15.8%-50.9%, with leakage reaching up to 26.7%) and uncovers a counterintuitive trade-off critical for industrial deployment: higher task utility often correlates with increased privacy violations.
Moreover, the massive scale of enterprise data and potential user behavior further amplify this vulnerability. Simply increasing model size or reasoning depth fails to address the problem. We conclude that safeguarding enterprise workflows requires a paradigm shift, moving beyond model-centric scaling toward context-centric architectures.

CI-Work: Benchmarking Contextual Integrity in Enterprise LLM Agents

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance in Machine Translation (MT), but deploying them at scale remains prohibitively expensive. 
A widely adopted remedy is the hybrid system paradigm, which balances cost and quality by serving most requests with a small model and selectively routing a fraction to a large model. 
However, existing routing strategies often rely on heuristics, external predictors, or absolute quality estimation, which fail to capture whether the large model actually provides a worthwhile improvement over the small one. 
In this paper, we formulate routing as a budget allocation problem and identify marginal gain, i.e., the large model’s improvement over the small model, as the optimal signal for budgeted decisions. 
Building on this, we propose \textbf{RouteLMT} (routing for LLM-based MT), an efficient in-model router that predicts this expected gain by probing the small translator’s prompt-token representation, without requiring external models or hypothesis decoding. 
Extensive experiments demonstrate that our RouteLMT outperforms heuristics, quality/difficulty estimation baselines, achieving a superior quality–budget Pareto frontier. 
Furthermore, we analyze regression risks and show that a simple guarded variant can mitigate severe quality losses.

RouteLMT: Learned Sample Routing for Hybrid LLM Translation Deployment

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems, despite low overall word error rates, produce residual lexical errors that disproportionately affect semantically critical tokens such as named entities, negations, and sentiment-bearing words. These errors are often structured, arising from phonetic similarity rather than random noise, making naive token-level correction insufficient.
We propose a structured ASR correction framework, that we call G-SPIN, that combines phonetic graph modeling with contextual language understanding. A graph neural network (GNN) first constructs acoustically plausible candidate neighborhoods for flagged tokens, explicitly restricting the correction search space to phonetic alternatives. A masked language model (MLM) then provides local contextual scoring, and an instruction-tuned large language model (LLM) performs final context-aware re-ranking over this compact candidate set. By decoupling structured phonetic reasoning from contextual semantic selection, our method avoids unconstrained generation while improving correction accuracy. The framework is lightweight, modular, and operates entirely at inference time.

Graph-Based Phonetic Error Correction of Noisy ASR

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have achieved remarkable success on complex tasks by leveraging long chain-of-thought (CoT) trajectories, yet they frequently exhibit overthinking on simple queries, resulting in significant token overhead and reduced inference efficiency. However, existing compression methods predominantly apply uniform length reduction or rely on coarse-grained difficulty estimation, often leading to performance degradation on difficult problems. To address this limitation, we propose Confidence-Adaptive Thinking (CAT), a framework that incorporates the model's intrinsic self-certainty signals as confidence into the preference optimization process, which autonomously modulates reasoning lengths based on problem difficulty. Experimental results show that CAT consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on reasoning accuracy across multiple benchmarks on different base models. Our work enables LRMs to effectively compress confident responses while deliberating on uncertain ones, offering a potentially robust solution for balancing accuracy and latency in practical industrial scenarios.

CAT: Confidence-Adaptive Thinking for Efficient Reasoning of Large Reasoning Models

Prompt choice is crucial in adapting language models to text classification tasks, particularly under low-resource conditions. Manual prompt engineering is time-consuming, non-scalable, and brittle, while current auto-prompting techniques are still far from maturity. This paper presents a two-stage method for prompt learning of frozen language models, CRL-Prompt, based on soft prompt initialization followed by contrastive and reinforcement-based refinement. An experimental study demonstrates that our approach achieves consistent improvements in accuracy over baseline prompt tuning strategies, with gains of up to 2.2% while training fewer than 0.25% of model parameters.

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Unleashing Low-Bit Inference on Ascend NPUs: A Comprehensive Evaluation of HiFloat Formats

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