United States

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly adopted in downstream industries, yet aligning proprietary agents remains challenging due to limited high-quality data and hardware constraints in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).
We propose EfficientTool, a cost-effective, tool-conditioned alignment framework forming a closed loop over data collection, iterative training, and deployment-oriented evaluation.
EfficientTool adopts a self-evolving bootstrapping-based Trajectory Collection Pipeline for high-quality trajectory generation, followed by iterative Model Training Pipeline using tool-conditioned parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT).
We evaluate the model with Interaction and Evaluation Pipeline in public and private benchmarks, and deploy for an internal enterprise agent.
Results show that EfficientTool effectively aligns model in SME scenarios while preserving general tool-calling capability.

ACL 2026

EfficientTool: A Cost-Effective Aligning Framework for Tool-Conditioned Agents in SME Scenarios

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

As large language models (LLMs) grow in size, efficient compression techniques like quantization and sparsification are critical. While quantization maintains performance with reduced precision, structured sparsity methods, such as N:M sparsification, often fall short due to limited flexibility and sensitivity to outlier weights. We explore 8:16 semi-structured sparsity, demonstrating its ability to surpass the Performance Threshold---where a compressed model matches the accuracy of its uncompressed or smaller counterpart under equivalent memory constraints. Compared to 2:4 sparsity, 8:16 offers greater flexibility with minimal storage overhead (0.875 vs. 0.75 bits/element). We also apply sparse structured patterns for salient weights, showing that structured sparsity for outliers is competitive with unstructured approaches, leading to equivalent or better results. Finally, we demonstrate that simple techniques such as variance correction and SmoothQuant-like weight equalization improve sparse models performance.

From 2:4 to 8:16 sparcity patterns in LLMs for Outliers and Weights with Variance Correction

Production LLMs must balance modeling quality with predictable latency, stable accelerator utilization, and cost-efficient scaling—constraints that remain difficult for existing architectures. Transformers provide strong reasoning but incur quadratic complexity, while state-space models (SSMs) scale efficiently yet lack fine-grained interactions; prior hybrids either introduce sequential bottlenecks or rely on learned routing that complicates deployment. We present FlowHN, a deployment-oriented parallel hybrid architecture that enables deterministic conditional computation via FLOP-aware token circulation across attention and SSM branches. Instead of dynamic expert routing, FlowHN performs hardware-aligned token scheduling that balances workloads, reduces synchronization stalls, and preserves full parameter utilization. Across 135M–1B models, FlowHN achieves up to 4× higher throughput and 15% higher MFU than strong Transformer, SSM, and hybrid baselines while maintaining competitive accuracy on reasoning, coding, and long-context tasks up to 32K tokens. FlowHN is designed to integrate directly into existing Hybrid pipelines without changes to optimizers, training stacks, or inference serving infrastructure, making it practical for real-world deployment.

FlowHN: Adaptive Token Routing for Efficient Parallel Hybrid Networks

NL2SQL systems deployed in industry settings often encounter ambiguous or unanswerable queries, especially in interactive scenarios with incomplete user clarifications. Existing benchmarks typically assume a single point of ambiguity and typically rely on users to resolve them via interactions, overlooking realistic failure modes. We introduce CLARITY, a framework that automatically generates ambiguous and unanswerable NL2SQL benchmark with multi-faceted ambiguity and diverse user behaviour in both single- and multi-turn settings. Using a constraint-driven pipeline, CLARITY transforms executable SQL into ambiguous queries augmented with grounded conversational continuations and schema-level metadata. Empirical evaluation on Spider and BIRD indicates that leading NL2SQL systems (based on strong LLMs) exhibit pronounced performance degradation under multi-faceted ambiguity. They frequently flag ambiguous inputs but fail to accurately localize or disambiguate the underlying schema-level sources, underscoring the need for further industry-focused research on robust ambiguity detection and resolution in NL2SQL bolstered by this work.

CLARITY: A Framework and Benchmark for Conversational Language Ambiguity and Unanswerability in Interactive NL2SQL Systems

Related search query recommendation is essential for enhancing user engagement and information discovery on digital platforms. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have shifted the field toward generative retrieval, existing methods suffer from two primary limitations: (1) pointwise generation via beam search often leads to semantic redundancy and wasted retrieval quota, and (2) current listwise approaches lack explicit reasoning, relying on superficial click-through rate (CTR) rewards. In this paper, we propose ReList, a novel framework that transforms related search into a reasoning-enhanced listwise generation task. ReList follows a two-stage training paradigm: first, Reasoning Activation constructs a high-quality dataset by back-translating diverse query lists into Chain-of-Thought (CoT) rationales; second, Alternative Training iteratively evolves the model using Reinforcement Learning with a Gated Multi-Objective Reward and a Corrective SFT mechanism to handle hard samples. Experimental results on real-world search benchmarks and online A/B tests demonstrate that ReList significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both query diversity and user engagement, providing more insightful and logically grounded query recommendations.

ReList: A Multi-objective Reasoning Framework for Diversified Listwise Query Recommendation

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated considerable efficacy in 
classification tasks, yet their performance depends on two critical prompt components: Task Instructions (HOW to classify) and Class Descriptions (WHAT defines each class). While prompt engineering research has extensively explored instruction optimization, class descriptions have received comparatively less attention, often being treated as fixed inputs or simple label names. This represents a critical gap for real-world classification tasks, particularly in contact center domains, where labels often suffer from ambiguous boundaries, overlapping definitions, and incomplete coverage of possible cases—substantially limiting accuracy regardless of instruction 
quality.


We propose a multi-agent framework for iteratively refining class descriptions based on classification errors. By analyzing misclassified 
instances, language agents automatically generate improved descriptions that better capture class distinctions and resolve ambiguities. Empirical evaluation across contact center and public benchmark datasets demonstrates upto 20.71% accuracy improvements over static class descriptions, addressing an orthogonal dimension to existing instruction optimization techniques.

Beyond Instruction Optimization: Multi-Agent Error-Driven Class Description Refinement for LLM-Based Classification

Large-scale integrity enforcement on short-form video platforms typically relies on multiple specialized vertical modules, each dedicated to a specific risk category. However, exhaustively executing these computationally intensive modules over massive content streams leads to substantial inference overhead, despite the fact that most content is benign and violations are usually confined to limited policy domains. To address this inefficiency, we propose RADAR, a lightweight risk-aware routing framework that selectively releases low-risk content while dispatching high-risk instances to appropriate vertical modules. Industrial deployment of such routing systems presents two major challenges: (1) systematic label sparsity caused by disjoint annotation pipelines across risk categories, and (2) the capacity-efficiency tradeoff inherent to compact routing architectures. To overcome these challenges, RADAR incorporates Validity-Aware Masking to handle fragmented supervision and Expert-Guided Knowledge Distillation to transfer knowledge from heavyweight expert models into the lightweight router. Experiments on large-scale real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed masking strategy effectively mitigates disjoint annotation issues, while distillation substantially enhances routing accuracy, enabling the lightweight router to achieve competitive or superior performance compared to specialized expert models.

RADAR: Risk-Aware Distilled Adaptive Routing for Efficient Short-Form Video Platform Ecosystem Governance

In-context learning (ICL) enables Large Language Models (LLMs) to adapt to new tasks using few examples, with task vectors, defined as specific hidden state activations hypothesized to encode task information. Existing studies are limited by small-scale benchmarks, restricting comprehensive analysis. We introduce QᴜɪᴛᴇAFᴇᴡ, a novel dataset of 3,096 diverse few-shot tasks, each with 30 input-output pairs derived from the Alpaca dataset. Experiments with Llama-3-8B on QᴜɪᴛᴇAFᴇᴡ reveal: (1) task vector performance peaks at an intermediate layer (e.g., 15th), (2) effectiveness varies significantly by task type, and (3) complex tasks rely on multiple, subtask-specific vectors rather than a single vector, suggesting distributed task knowledge representation.

One Task Vector is not Enough: A Large-Scale Study for In-Context Learning

With the emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs), new methods in Information Retrieval are available in which relevance is estimated directly through language understanding and reasoning, instead of embedding similarity. We argue that similarity is a \textit{short-sighted} interpretation of relevance, and that LLM-Based Relevance Judgment Systems (LLM-RJS) (with reasoning) have potential to outperform Neural Embedding Retrieval Systems (NERS) by overcoming this limitation. Using the TREC-DL 2019 passage retrieval dataset, we compare various LLM-RJS with NERS, but observe no noticeable improvement. Subsequently, we analyze the impact of reasoning by comparing LLM-RJS with and without reasoning. We find that human annotations also suffer from short-sightedness, and that false-positives in the reasoning LLM-RJS are primarily mistakes in annotations due to short-sightedness. We conclude that LLM-RJS do have the ability to address the short-sightedness limitation in NERS, but that this cannot be evaluated with standard annotated relevance datasets.

Why Large Language Models can Secretly Outperform Embedding Similarity in Information Retrieval

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) based on dense embeddings has become a dominant paradigm for text retrieval. However, many real-world applications require attribute-specific querying, where explicit values or properties must be extracted from text (e.g., symptoms in clinical notes or dosage values in medical reports). Dense retrieval handles paraphrastic variation well but often entangles multiple attributes within a single embedding, making value extraction difficult. Knowledge graphs (KGs), in contrast, support explicit attribute access but are brittle under linguistic and structural variation, leading to low recall. This thesis proposal aims to investigate the representational trade-off underlying these approaches. We study knowledge graph representations from an information-theoretic and optimal coding perspective, focusing on the tension between fine-grained factorization and compact canonicalization of concepts. Building on this perspective, we propose a query-driven framework for constructing and retrieving knowledge graphs from text, aiming to combine the robustness of dense retrieval with the explicit queryability of symbolic representations.

Thesis Proposal: On the Granularity-Robustness Trade-off in Text-Derived Knowledge Graphs

Federated learning with heterogeneous client architectures cannot rely on parameter aggregation. Prototype-based methods address architectural heterogeneity by exchanging class-level representations, but naively averaging prototypes across non-IID clients leads to semantic drift and poor inter-class separation. We propose FedPAGR, a framework where heterogeneous clients project their features into a shared consensus space and exchange class prototypes with a central server. The server refines aggregated prototypes through a geometric regularization objective that enforces agreement with client submissions and inter-class angular separation. Clients anchor their classifiers to the refined prototypes and train with a composite objective combining classification, prototype alignment, and entropy regularization. We evaluate FedPAGR across multiple domains, including four image benchmarks and a clinical NLP task using heterogeneous ClinicalBERT variants, with five architectures per federation under severe label heterogeneity ($\alpha{=}0.1$). FedPAGR achieves the highest ensemble accuracy across all four image datasets and the highest local test accuracy on low-class and clinical tasks, including a 4.99-point improvement over the strongest baseline on MIMIC-IV, while remaining competitive on high-class benchmarks.

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From 2:4 to 8:16 sparcity patterns in LLMs for Outliers and Weights with Variance Correction

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