United States

We present **Dash-M5H**, an interactive dashboard for *multi-modal, multi-model mental health* assessment that helps clinicians and researchers jointly inspect multimodal behavioral data with multi-model signal outputs of recorded clinical interviews. Guided by signal detection and integrated sensemaking theories, Dash-M5H synchronizes transcript text, audio, and facial behavior (action units and gaze) to support overview-to-detail evidence tracing; and it integrates extracted signals (e.g., sentiment and facial activity) with a clinically grounded VLM prediction pipeline that produces DSM-5-aligned depression predictions. Dash-M5H (https://dash-m5h.io) is implemented in a lightweight, browser-based stack (Quarto + Observable JS + D3), supports local data import and time-synced clinical annotation with export. We demonstrate Dash-M5H through a depression screening scenario, evaluate its note-taking and screening capabilities through a user experiment, and release a live demo (https://youtu.be/w3qCJ02k6bw) and code (https://github.com/nd-hal/M5H-Dashboard-VLM) to facilitate reproducible evaluation.

ACL 2026

Dash-M5H: An Interactive Dashboard for Multi-Modal, Multi-Model Mental Health Assessment

2025 National Inter-University Health Data & AI Inquiry Program - this program is a unique project-based inquiry and science communication program that brings together students from diverse academic backgrounds and research interests. Presented research projects explore how generative AI is being applied to medication management, mental health screening, and chronic disease monitoring to align with the future of pharmacy practice.

Aging Powerfully: AI Blueprint for Chronic Disease Management and Social Determinants of Longevity

2025 National Inter-University Health Data & AI Inquiry Program is a unique project-based inquiry and science communication program that brings together students from diverse academic backgrounds and research interests. 

demo

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.

Large language models (LLMs) frequently generate factually incorrect or unverifiable statements, motivating tool-augmented verification systems that combine model reasoning with external evidence retrieval. For factuality evaluation to be scientifically reliable, verification pipelines must be controllable and reproducible: retrieval configuration and reasoning behavior should be explicitly configurable and stable across runs. In practice, many existing systems depend on commercial search APIs whose ranking policies and retrieval behaviors are opaque and externally controlled, introducing uncontrolled variability into evaluation. This makes it difficult to disentangle reasoning errors from retrieval effects. We present FactSearch, a reproducible, claim-level factuality verification system built on locally aggregated open-source search infrastructure. FactSearch decomposes model outputs into atomic factual claims, retrieves supporting evidence via a self-hosted meta-search engine, and performs modular verification within a fully configurable pipeline. By treating retrieval infrastructure as a first-class component, the system enables deterministic configurations and systematic analysis of retrieval–reasoning interactions. An interactive web interface supports transparent inspection and practical deployment. A demo video is available at: 
\href{https://youtu.be/qbfA2vIxsiI}{https://youtu.be/qbfA2vIxsiI}. Code is at \href{https://github.com/aialt/factsearch}{https://github.com/aialt/factsearch}.

FactSearch: An Interactive Fact Search and Claim-Level Verification System for Large Language Models

Gardener is an interactive agentic system for single-cell RNA-seq (scRNA-seq) analysis that enables expert-steered, iterative workflows under strict data-residency requirements. Existing large language model (LLM)-based analysis agents commonly encode workflow progress as implicit conversational state and rely on cloud-centric execution, which hinders traceability and auditability and complicates keeping sensitive expression data on-device. Gardener grounds cloud-side reasoning in a local, on-device scientific engine and an Experiment Management Kernel (EMK) that externalizes analysis progress as persistent, immutable snapshots linked by lineage. This explicit state representation supports rollback, branching, and comparison of alternative analysis paths while reusing prior computation. Gardener enforces data isolation by design: cloud-hosted LLMs operate only on snapshot identifiers and sanitized summaries, while raw expression matrices and local artifacts remain on the user’s device. A local graphical user interface (GUI) provides human-in-the-loop steering and inspection of workflow state and outputs. Gardener is released as an open-source desktop application for macOS and Windows under the Apache License 2.0.

Gardener: An Agentic AI System for Single-Cell RNA Sequence Analysis

Clinical decision-making requires synthesizing heterogeneous evidence, including patient histories, clinical guidelines, and trajectories of comparable cases. While large language models (LLMs) offer strong reasoning capabilities, they remain prone to hallucinations and struggle to integrate long, structured medical documents. We present MED-COPILOT, an interactive clinical decision-support system designed for clinicians and medical trainees, which combines guideline-grounded GraphRAG retrieval with hybrid semantic–keyword similar-patient retrieval to support transparent and evidence-aware clinical reasoning. The system builds a structured knowledge graph from WHO and NICE guidelines, applies community-level summarization for efficient retrieval, and maintains a 36,000-case similar-patient database derived from SOAP-normalized MIMIC-IV notes and Synthea-generated records.

We evaluate our framework on clinical note completion and medical question answering, and demonstrate that it consistently outperforms parametric LLM baselines and standard RAG, improving both generation fidelity and clinical reasoning accuracy. The full system is available at https://huggingface.co/spaces/Cryo3978/Med_GraphRAG
, enabling users to inspect retrieved evidence, visualize token-level similarity contributions, and conduct guided follow-up analysis. Our results demonstrate a practical and interpretable approach to integrating structured guideline knowledge with patient-level analogical evidence for clinical LLMs.

MED-COPILOT: A Medical Assistant Powered by GraphRAG and Similar Patient Case Retrieval

Deploying production-ready multi-agent systems (MAS) in complex industrial environments remains challenging due to limitations in scalability, observability, and autonomous evolution. We present OxyGent, an open-source framework that enables modular, observable, and evolvable MAS via a unified Oxy abstraction, in which agents, tools, LLMs, and reasoning flows are encapsulated as pluggable atomic components. This Lego-like assembly paradigm supports scalable system composition and non-intrusive monitoring. To enhance observability, OxyGent introduces permission-driven dynamic planning that replaces rigid workflows with execution graphs generated at runtime, which provide adaptive visualizations. To support continuous evolution, the framework integrates OxyBank, an AI asset management platform that supports automated data backflow, annotation, and joint evolution. Empirical evaluations and real-world case studies show that OxyGent provides a robust and scalable foundation for MAS. OxyGent is publicly available at \url{https://oxygent.jd.com/}.

OxyGent: Making Multi-Agent Systems Modular, Observable, and Evolvable via Oxy Abstraction

Effective interdisciplinary communication is frequently hindered by domain-specific terms. These terms, or jargon, are dependent on a listener's background, and rarely do listeners seek explanations due to distraction and social concerns. To address these concerns, we built ParseJargon, an interactive LLM-powered system providing real-time personalized jargon support tailored to users’ individual backgrounds in online meetings. We first evaluated the effectiveness of personalization in a controlled setting with human participants. By comparing ParseJargon against baseline (no support) and general-purpose (non-personalized) conditions, we found that ParseJargon provided more precise jargon identification, and enhanced participants' comprehension, engagement, and appreciation of colleagues' work. We then evaluated the potential for using ParseJargon in real-time meetings through a latency test.

ParseJargon: Personalized Real-time Jargon Support in Online Meetings

Empathy plays a crucial role in prosocial behavior and supportive human interactions. According to emotional validation theory, effective empathetic conversations require observing and reflecting on the help-seeker’s situation before offering emotional support and guidance. While recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have enabled fluent and coherent dialogue generation, our preliminary study reveals that existing LLMs struggle to generate emotional support response. Instead, they tend to offer repetitive solutions without sufficiently considering the emotional needs of help-seekers. To address this limitation, we propose \textbf{EVA}: empathetic LLMs with \textbf{E}motional \textbf{VA}lidation. EVA enhances empathetic response generation through a two-stage training process: empathy acquisition and emotional validation alignment. For the emotional validation alignment, we introduce the Emotional Validation Aware Dataset (EVAD), which is annotated with levels of emotional validation theory as conversations progress. Additionally, we propose EVAEval, a novel evaluation metric designed to assess whether a model-generated response aligns with emotional validation theory. Experimental results demonstrate that the EVA method significantly improves empathetic response generation, achieving superior performance in both automatic and human evaluations. Furthermore, comprehensive analyses confirm that the EVA method effectively mitigates patterned responses while ensuring adherence to emotional validation principles.

I Don't Need Solution. I Need Emotional Support \n : Empathetic LLMs based on Emotional Validation

Text-to-image (T2I) models have achieved remarkable progress in high-quality image synthesis, yet most benchmarks rely on simple, self-contained prompts, failing to capture the complexity of real-world captions. Human-written captions often involve multiple interacting subjects, rich contextual references, and abstractive phrasing, conditions under which current image-text encoders like CLIP struggle. To systematically study these deficiencies, we introduce ANCHOR, a large-scale dataset of 70K+ abstractive captions sourced from five major news media organizations. Analysis with ANCHOR reveals persistent failures in multi-subject understanding, context reasoning, and nuanced grounding. Motivated by these challenges, we propose Subject-Aware Fine-tuning (SAFE), which uses Large Language Models (LLMs) to extract key subjects and enhance their representation at the embedding-level. Experiments with contemporary models show that SAFE significantly improves image-caption consistency and human preference alignment, serving as a practical and scalable solution. The dataset and code will be released upon publication.

ANCHOR: LLM-driven Subject Conditioning for Text-to-Image Synthesis

The inherent rigidity of fixed-size benchmarks makes them an inefficient tool for model evaluation. Diverse evaluation objectives, including model ranking, model selection and testing throughout development, demand varying levels of statistical power. The mismatch between fixed sample sizes and these diverse needs results in either excessive computational cost or compromised reliability – a critical concern for model evaluation. To overcome these limitations, we call for adoption of sequential testing in our field. We provide an adaptive evaluation framework, that provides a principled way to navigate the trade-off between efficiency and reliability in model evaluation. Our framework combines the established statistical paradigm of sequential testing with stopping criteria tailored to common evaluation needs such as diminishing returns detection, and minimum detectable effect size. We demonstrate its ability to adaptively manage the efficiency-reliability trade-off on the Open VLM Leaderboard, including, for example, a 80% reduction in computational cost compared to fixed-size evaluation (with a 2.5-point CI width allowance) while maintaining statistical significance.

 Stop Guessing When to Stop Testing: Efficient Model Evaluation with Just Enough Data

Due to the prevalence of large language models (LLMs), key-value (KV) cache reduction for LLM inference has received remarkable attention. Among numerous works that have been proposed in recent years, layer-wise token pruning approaches, which select a subset of tokens at particular layers to retain in KV cache and prune others, are one of the most popular schemes. They primarily adopt a set of pre-defined layers, at which tokens are selected. Such design is inflexible in the sense that the accuracy significantly varies across tasks and deteriorates in harder tasks such as KV retrieval. In this paper, we propose ASL, a training-free method that adaptively chooses the selection layer for KV cache reduction, exploiting the variance of token ranks ordered by attention score. The proposed method balances the performance across different tasks while meeting the user-specified KV budget requirement. ASL operates during the prefilling stage and can be jointly used with existing KV cache reduction methods such as SnapKV to optimize the decoding stage. By evaluations on the InfiniteBench, RULER, and NIAH benchmarks, we show that ASL, equipped with one-shot token selection, adaptively trades inference speed for accuracy, outperforming state-of-the-art layer-wise token pruning methods in difficult tasks.

 Adaptive Layer Selection for Layer-Wise Token Pruning in LLM Inference

The rise of reasoning models necessitates large-scale verifiable data, for which programming tasks serve as an ideal source. However, while competitive programming platforms provide abundant problems and solutions, high-quality test cases for verification remain scarce. Existing approaches attempt to synthesize test cases using Large Language Models (LLMs), but rely solely on the model's intrinsic generation capabilities without external feedback, frequently resulting in insufficiently diverse cases. To address this limitation, we propose a $\textbf{Feedback-Driven Iterative Framework}$ for comprehensive test case construction. Specifically, our method leverages the LLM to generate initial test cases, executes them against known correct and incorrect solutions, and utilizes the failed results as feedback to guide the LLM in refining the test cases toward high fidelity and discriminability. We then apply this method to the CodeContests dataset to construct an optimized high-quality derivative, $\textbf{CodeContests-O}$. Evaluating against the entire pool of solutions ($1.1 \times 10^7$ in total), our dataset achieves an average True Positive Rate (TPR) of $89.35$\% and True Negative Rate (TNR) of $90.30$\%, significantly outperforming the CodeContests and CodeContests+ by margins of $4.30$\% and $8.78$\%, respectively. Furthermore, fine-tuning the Qwen2.5-7B model on CodeContests-O results in a $9.52$\% improvement on LiveCodeBench (Pass@1). Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework and the quality of CodeContests-O.

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FactSearch: An Interactive Fact Search and Claim-Level Verification System for Large Language Models

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