United States

Legal texts often contain computational legal clauses—provisions whose understanding requires complex logic. While frontier Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) can describe such clauses, building production-ready systems is limited by reasoning errors and the high cost of inference. We propose Amortized Intelligence, a neuro-symbolic approach where we use an LLM once to translate a legal text into Deterministic Autonomous Contract Language (DACL): a typed graph intermediate representation. Adjudication then relies on deterministic graph executions with a visually auditable trace. In comparison against runtime LRM baselines (including GPT-5.2 and Gemini 3 Pro), our DACL-based Agent achieves near-perfect consistency and mitigates the &quot;reasoning cliff&quot; observed in probabilistic models. The system reduces compute costs by over 90% in high-volume workflows while satisfying the strict auditability requirements of legal adjudication.

ACL 2026

Accurate Legal Reasoning at Scale: Neuro-Symbolic Offloading and Structural Auditability for Robust Legal Adjudication

**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.

The conference program is packed with insightful presentations, thought-provoking workshops, and engaging networking opportunities. In addition to the technical sessions, we have also planned several social events that will provide you with the opportunity to connect with your colleagues.

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Of course, we are grateful to our sponsors and partners for their generous support of EMNLP 2023, whose contributions make it possible for us to host this world-class event.

Yuji Matsumoto (RIKEN AIP) 
EMNLP 2023 General Chair

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EMNLP 2023

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

Legal texts often contain computational legal clauses—provisions whose understanding requires complex logic. While frontier Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) can describe such clauses, building production-ready systems is limited by reasoning errors and the high cost of inference. We propose Amortized Intelligence, a neuro-symbolic approach where we use an LLM once to translate a legal text into Deterministic Autonomous Contract Language (DACL): a typed graph intermediate representation. Adjudication then relies on deterministic graph executions with a visually auditable trace. In comparison against runtime LRM baselines (including GPT-5.2 and Gemini 3 Pro), our DACL-based Agent achieves near-perfect consistency and mitigates the "reasoning cliff" observed in probabilistic models. The system reduces compute costs by over 90% in high-volume workflows while satisfying the strict auditability requirements of legal adjudication.

poster

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. 
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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.

Model merging is widely used to combine fine-tuned models trained with different data distributions, tasks, or hyperparameters, yet its role during LLM pre-training remains underexplored. We systematically study checkpoint merging across training phases, focusing on the transition from stable to decaying learning rates. Across multiple scales, we find that simple averaging methods consistently improve performance during stable learning rate regimes, but gains sharply diminish during decay. We link this effect to reduced checkpoint diversity and show that merging effectiveness correlates with parameter-space variation. Strategies such as synthetic variability, task-vector merging, and cross-run merging yield only modest improvements. Our results provide practical insights on when merging is most effective in large-scale pre-training.

Practical Guidelines for Model Merging in LLMs Pre-Training

Large-scale introductory CS courses, often enrolling thousands of students, struggle to provide personalized support and encourage active participation. While recent large language models (LLMs) have enabled AI teaching assistants at scale, most existing systems remain reactive, responding only after students explicitly initiate queries. We present SCALA, a student-centered AI learning assistant designed to provide proactive support for students. SCALA introduces predictive query management, a mechanism that generates likely student questions and answers ahead of lectures. Students may choose to view these pre-generated question–answer pairs or engage in interactive conversations with our tutoring model via the same interface. We evaluate SCALA through a semester-long deployment in an undergraduate Python course with over 1,500 students, and find that predictive queries are frequently selected in practice and substantially overlap with real student questions. Based on student feedback, learners preferred SCALA’s responses to their real queries over alternatives such as GPT-4o. These results suggest proactive support as a promising direction for future development of AI-powered teaching assistants. We will release our codebase and interactive demo upon acceptance.

Let LLM Tutors Ask First: Proactive LLM-Based Tutoring at Scale in a 1,500-Student Online Classroom

While prompt engineering offers effective control over Text-to-Image (T2I) generation, it remains labor-intensive for large-scale production. We present PRISM-DUEL, a black-box framework that formalizes prompt optimization as Automatic Prompt Engineering (APE), motivated by advertising workflows requiring low-latency, diverse variants faithful to a human-designed ads. Since zero-shot LLMs are unreliable judges of image quality, PRISM-DUEL obtains label-free pairwise preferences and rationales from an LLM judge over pairs of generated images, then uses a dueling-bandit optimizer to optimize a prompt for generating controlled variations while matching the reference ad's visual content. By iteratively steering the prompt distribution towards higher-quality generations and improving posterior calibration, PRISM-DUEL preserves visual similarity and semantic faithfulness while increasing diversity. Experiments on PartiPrompts and DreamBooth across Gemini 2.5 Flash Image, FLUX.1, and Qwen-Image show consistent gains over strong baselines in visual faithfulness and prompt interpretability.

Automatic Prompt Engineering for Scalable Prompt Inversion in Text-to-Image Ad Generation

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as customer-facing agents, yet evaluating their reliability remains challenging due to stochastic, multi-turn interactions. Current evaluation protocols rely on linear Monte Carlo rollouts of full agent-user conversations to estimate success. This approach is computationally inefficient - reprocessing identical conversation prefixes across runs, and often fails to uncover deep failure modes triggered by rare user behaviors.


We introduce DIVERT (Diversity-Induced Evaluation via Branching of Trajectories), a snapshot-based, coverage-guided user simulation framework for efficient and systematic exploration of multi-turn agent behavior. DIVERT captures the full agent–environment state at critical junctions and resumes execution from these points, reusing shared prefixes to avoid redundant regeneration and reduce token cost. From each junction, it branches with targeted, diverse user responses, enabling directed exploration of alternative interaction paths while preserving task intent.


By reallocating computation from redundant restarts to behaviorally salient mid-trajectory states, DIVERT steers evaluation toward under-explored semantic regions and rare interaction failures. Experiments on realistic multi-domain benchmarks show that our method consistently improves failure discovery efficiency and task-level coverage compared to standard linear rollout evaluation, without increasing overall cost.

Efficient Agent Evaluation via Diversity-Guided User Simulation

LLM-based machine translation (MT) evaluation can closely match human judgments, but in practice it remains large diagnostic, with the signals rarely translating into direct quality improvements under real production constraints. We propose a two-stage, evaluator-guided automatic post-editing framework that turns MQM-style evaluation into targeted repairs: a retrieval-augmented LLM evaluator outputs structured, span-level MQM diagnoses under an explicit edit contract, and a separate LLM post-editor applies minimal edits restricted to those diagnoses. This separation improves controllability and reduces paraphrastic drift compared to one-stage "judge-and-refine'' baselines. In a systematic study involving seven LLMs spanning three model providers and English-to-German and English-to-Chinese test sets representing the e-commerce domain, our best configuration consistently improves both COMET-22 and CometKiwi scores over one-stage post-edit methods, while the evaluator's error spans and severities show strong agreement with human MQM annotations and human editor preferences.

Diagnose, Then Repair: A Two-Stage MQM-Guided Post-Editing Framework for Domain-Specific Machine Translation

Enterprise deep research often fails to produce decision-ready reports due to uneven information coverage, context explosion, and premature stopping. We propose a \textit{scalable} Enterprise Deep Research (EDR) architecture to address these failures. Our system (i) decomposes requests into coverage-driven objectives via outline generation with reflection, (ii) localizes context with dependency-guided execution and explicit information sharing, and (iii) enforces evidence-based completion criteria so agents iteratively collect information until sufficiency conditions are met. We evaluate on an internal sales-enablement task and the public DeepResearch Bench benchmark, where our proposed system design achieves the strongest overall performance against competitive deep-research baselines. The results show that dependency-controlled context and explicit evidence sufficiency criteria reduce premature stopping and improve the consistency and depth of enterprise research outputs. We will make our code and permitted data publicly available.

Don’t Stop Early: Scalable Enterprise Deep Research with Controlled Information Flow and Evidence-Aware Termination

Financial Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit strong domain expertise but remain vulnerable to financially harmful prompts. To systematically assess this vulnerability, we introduce \textbf{FinHarmBench}, a benchmark designed to evaluate financially harmful and confusable benign prompts. Our analysis reveals a concerning result that financial LLMs can be less robust than general-purpose models, suggesting that domain adaptation alone does not guarantee financial safety alignment. To address this issue, we propose \textbf{Financial Refusal Steering Distillation (FiRSD)}, an unsupervised training framework that strengthens financial-domain safety by learning and distilling a financial refusal direction at the representation level. FiRSD enhances refusal behavior without requiring annotated refusal responses. Experiments show that FiRSD substantially improves safety while largely preserving task capability. These results highlight the importance of domain-aware safety alignment for high-stakes financial applications.

FinHarmBench: Financial Jailbreak Benchmark and Unsupervised Safety Fine-Tuning via Refusal Steering Distillation

Multi-hop question answering (MHQA) is a practical bottleneck in industry applications such as enterprise assistants, customer-support copilots, and compliance analysis, where systems must combine evidence across multiple documents before answering. Large language models (LLMs) remain brittle in this setting: iterative retrieval can commit too early to low-recall trajectories, while planning-only approaches can produce static query sets that fail to adapt when intermediate evidence changes. We propose \textbf{Planned Active Retrieval and Reasoning RAG (PAR$^2$-RAG)}, a training-free two-stage framework that separates \emph{coverage} from \emph{commitment}. PAR$^2$-RAG first performs breadth-first anchoring to build a high-recall evidence frontier, then applies depth-first refinement with evidence sufficiency control in an iterative loop. This design targets deployment constraints by avoiding retraining cycles, reducing maintenance overhead under changing corpora, and improving scalability across domains. Across four MHQA benchmarks, PAR$^2$-RAG consistently outperforms strong baselines: compared with IRCoT, it achieves up to \textbf{23.5\%} higher answer accuracy and up to \textbf{10.5\%} NDCG gains in retrieval quality.

PAR2-RAG: Planned Active Retrieval and Reasoning for Multi-Hop Question Answering

Despite the success of Large Language Models (LLMs) in structured query generation, OData—a critical RESTful protocol for enterprise APIs—remains under-researched due to a lack of high-fidelity, execution-validated datasets. 
To bridge this gap, we introduce \textsc{OmniOData}, a framework that generates \textsc{SynOData}, the first large-scale OData corpus featuring execution-grounded queries and reasoning traces. 
Using this corpus, we develop \textsc{OmniOData-R1} (1.5B–3B parameters), a family of models that match or surpass frontier proprietary systems, such as GPT-4o and Gemini 3, on realistic industrial benchmarks. 
Our results demonstrate that the synergy of execution-verified synthetic data and Reinforcement Learning (RL) effectively unlocks the latent reasoning of Small Language Models (SLMs), providing a high-performance, low-latency solution for specialized enterprise query generation.
The code and data will be released under an open-source license.

$\texttt{OmniOData}$: Unleashing Small Language Models for OData Query Generation with Synthetic Data and Reinforcement Learning

Small language models (SLMs) are promising for real-world deployment due to their efficiency and low operational cost. However, their limited capacity struggles with high-stakes legal reasoning tasks that require coherent statute interpretation and logically consistent deduction. Furthermore, training SLMs for such tasks demands high-quality, concise reasoning trajectories, which are prohibitively expensive to manually collect and difficult to curate via standard rejection sampling, which lacks granularity beyond final verdicts. 
To address these challenges, we propose LegalDrill, a diagnosis-driven synthesis framework that extracts and iteratively refines reasoning trajectories from a capable teacher via fine-grained prompting, then a self-reflective verification is employed to adaptively select the most effective data for the SLM student. The resulting data empower SLM training through supervised fine-tuning and direct preference optimization. Extensive experiments on several legal benchmarks demonstrate that LegalDrill significantly bolsters the legal reasoning capabilities of representative SLMs while bypassing the need for scarce expert annotations, paving a scalable path toward practical legal reasoning systems.

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