United States

We propose a comprehensive framework for constructing multi-turn Text-to-OverpassQL dialogue datasets. Under this framework, we introduce the first multi-turn Text-to-OverpassQL dataset built upon the OverpassNL corpus. Our dataset comprises over 7,800 dialogues, each containing 2 to 4 user utterances, resulting in more than 20,000 individual utterances aligned with executable Overpass queries. To generate high-quality multi-turn dialogues, we design a four-stage pipeline. First, we convert Overpass queries into syntax trees using a custom parser developed based on the official OverpassQL grammar. This enables structural manipulation while preserving syntactic and executable validity. Second, we apply a diverse set of tree-editing templates, including both simple keyword-level changes and complex structural decompositions, to produce multiple valid and diverse Overpass queries. Third, we leverage a prompt-based approach to guide large language models in generating context-aware natural language questions, ensuring increasing inter-turn dependency across the dialogue. Finally, we implement a hybrid filtering strategy that combines manual annotation with model-assisted selection to validate alignment and correctness at scale. In addition to presenting the dataset, we evaluate the performance of several mainstream large language models and demonstrate that our end-to-end baseline model achieves competitive results. This work offers a new benchmark for studying executable semantic parsing and contextual understanding in map-based query tasks.

ACL 2026

MTO: A Multi-turn Conversational Text-to-OverpassQL Dataset for Enhanced OpenStreetMap Query Generation

Welcome to the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL). Continuing its mission of expanding and involving the science community of all European countries, EACL has selected the Malta community for the 18th EACL. Considering the importance of physical interaction among researchers, the conference will be held at the Hotel Radisson Blu, St. Julians, in Malta, from 17 to 22 of March, 2024. The conference will also feature the possibility to participate virtually. As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language. 
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EACL 2024

As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.

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. 
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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.

Critic-free reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR), exemplified by Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), avoids training a value function (critic) and reduces memory and compute overhead relative to critic-based PPO pipelines for aligning large language models. However, GRPO-style advantage estimation depends on prompt-local (within-prompt-group) reward statistics and can be unstable. In particular, when all rollouts in a prompt group receive identical rewards, the within-group reward variance becomes zero, and group normalization yields *zero* advantages for that group, impeding learning in cold-start regimes with binary verifiers. We introduce **BV-Blend**, a critic-free framework that stabilizes advantage estimation by combining prompt-local on-policy statistics with semantic-cluster-conditioned historical moments. BV-Blend maintains EMA-tracked reward moments for each cluster, derives a confidence weight from a standard error of the mean (SEM) proxy, and uses this weight to blend historical and prompt-local baseline and variance statistics into a standardized advantage for PPO-style clipped updates. Experiments on verifiable reasoning benchmarks show that BV-Blend improves training stability and performance, and remains robust in regimes where group-normalized methods may stall.

BV-Blend: Uncertainty-Weighted Historical Baselines for Stable Critic-Free RL with Verifiable Rewards

Recent advancements in Large Generative Models (LGMs) have revolutionized multi-modal generation. However, generating illustrated storybooks remains an open challenge, where prior works mainly decompose this task into separate stages, and thus, holistic multi-modal grounding remains limited. Besides, while safety alignment is studied for text- or image-only generation, existing works rarely integrate child-specific safety constraints into narrative planning and sequence-level multi-modal verification. To address these limitations, we propose BookAgent, a safety-aware multi-agent collaboration framework designed for high-quality, safety-aware visual narratives. Different from prior story visualization models that assume a fixed storyline sequence, BookAgent targets end-to-end storybook synthesis from a user draft by jointly planning, scripting, illustrating, and globally repairing inconsistencies. To ensure precise multi-modal grounding, BookAgent dynamically calibrates page-level alignment between textual scripts and visual layouts. Furthermore, BookAgent calibrates holistic consistency from the temporal dimension, by verifying-then-rectifying global inconsistencies in character identity and storytelling logic. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BookAgent significantly outperforms current methods in narrative coherence, visual consistency, and safety compliance, offering a robust paradigm for reliable agents in complex multi-modal creation. The implementation will be publicly released at https://github.com/bogao-code/BookAgent/tree/main.

BOOKAGENT: Orchestrating Safety-Aware Visual Narratives via Multi-Agent Cognitive Calibration

Ensuring the safety and compliance of large language models (LLMs) is of paramount importance. However, existing LLM safety datasets often rely on ad-hoc taxonomies for data generation and suffer from a significant shortage of rule-grounded, real-world cases that are essential for robustly protecting LLMs. In this work, we address this critical gap by constructing a comprehensive safety dataset from a compliance perspective. Using a powerful web-searching agent, we collect a rule-grounded, real-world case dataset OmniCompliance-100K, sourced from multi-domain authoritative references. The dataset spans 74 regulations and policies across a wide range of domains, including security and privacy regulations, content safety and user data privacy policies from leading AI companies and social media platforms, financial security requirements, medical device risk management standards, educational integrity guidelines, and protections of fundamental human rights. In total, our dataset contains 12,985 distinct rules and 106,009 associated real-world compliance cases. Our analysis confirms a strong alignment between the rules and their corresponding cases. We further conduct extensive benchmarking experiments to evaluate the safety and compliance capabilities of advanced LLMs across different model scales. Our experiments reveal several interesting findings that have great potential to offer valuable insights for future LLM safety research.

OmniCompliance-100K: A Multi-Domain, Rule-Grounded, Real-World Safety Compliance Dataset

Recent work on music question answering (Music-QA) has primarily focused on single-track understanding, where models answer questions about an individual audio clip using its tags, captions, or metadata. However, listeners often describe music in comparative terms, and existing benchmarks do not systematically evaluate reasoning across multiple tracks. Building on the Jamendo-QA dataset, we introduce Jamendo-MT-QA, a dataset and benchmark for multi-track comparative question answering. From Creative Commons-licensed tracks on Jamendo, we construct 36,519 comparative QA items over 12,173 track pairs, with each pair yielding three question types: yes/no, short-answer, and sentence-level questions. We describe an LLM-assisted pipeline for generating and filtering comparative questions, and benchmark representative audio-language models using both automatic metrics and LLM-as-a-Judge evaluation.

Jamendo-MT-QA: A Benchmark for Multi-Track Comparative Music Question Answering

Large language model (LLM)-integrated applications have become increasingly prevalent, yet face critical security vulnerabilities from prompt injection (PI) attacks. Defending against PI attacks faces two major issues: malicious instructions can be injected through diverse vectors, and injected instructions often lack clear semantic boundaries from the surrounding context, making them difficult to identify. To address these issues, we propose InstruCoT, a model enhancement method for PI defense that synthesizes diverse training data and employs instruction-level chain-of-thought fine-tuning, enabling LLMs to effectively identify and reject malicious instructions regardless of their source or position in the context. We evaluate InstruCoT across three critical dimensions: Behavior Deviation, Privacy Leakage, and Harmful Output. Experimental results across four LLMs demonstrate that InstruCoT significantly outperforms baselines in all dimensions while maintaining utility performance without degradation.

Know Thy Enemy: Securing LLMs Against Prompt Injection via Diverse Data Synthesis and Instruction-Level Chain-of-Thought Learning

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as an effective paradigm for enhancing model reasoning. However, existing RL methods like GRPO often rely on unstructured self-sampling to fit scalar rewards, often producing inefficient rollouts that fail to capture transferable problem-solving strategies. To address these limitations, we propose **TemplateRL**, a structured template-guided RL framework that augments policy optimization with explicit template guidance. Our approach first constructs a problem-solving template library via MCTS on a small seed set, then seamlessly integrates this high-level structured guidance into RL training. By guiding rollout generation to align with proven template structures, TemplateRL significantly improves high-quality trajectory hit rates while reducing ineffective exploration. This structure-guided design steers the policy toward validated strategic patterns, stabilizing training dynamics, and enhancing RL sampling efficiency. Notably, the explicit template library is interpretable, editable, and supports online updates-enabling continuous updates during both training and inference. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TemplateRL outperforms GRPO by 99% on AIME and 41% on AMC, with superior stability on weak models and remarkable cross-domain generalization, highlighting its potential for broader tasks.

TemplateRL: Structured Template-Guided Reinforcement Learning for LLM Reasoning

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate strong performance, but they often lack transparency. We introduce GeoLAN, a training framework that treats token representations as geometric trajectories and applies stickiness conditions inspired by recent developments related to the Kakeya Conjecture. We have developed two differentiable regularizers, Katz-Tao Convex Wolff (KT-CW) and Katz-Tao Attention (KT-Attn), that promote isotropy and encourage diverse attention. Our experiments with Gemma-3 (1B, 4B, 12B) and Llama-3-8B show that GeoLAN frequently maintains task accuracy while improving geometric metrics and reducing certain fairness biases. These benefits are most significant in mid-sized models. Our findings reveal scale-dependent trade-offs between geometric precision and performance, suggesting that geometry-aware training is a promising approach to enhance mechanistic interpretability.

GeoLAN: Geometric Learning of Latent Explanatory Directions in Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed worldwide, yet they exhibit strong Western-centric biases, and the internal mechanisms governing their cultural behaviors remain poorly understood. Prior work has identified so-called cultural neurons, but individual neurons are often polysemous, conflating abstract cultural knowledge with surface-level lexical cues due to superposition. We apply Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) to decompose intermediate LLM activations into sparse, interpretable feature representations that disentangle these factors. This analysis reveals culturally selective features that remain invariant across paraphrasing and task formats, indicating abstraction beyond lexical correlations. Through targeted feature ablation, we provide causal evidence that these features are necessary for cultural reasoning: their removal selectively degrades performance on culturally conditioned tasks. Furthermore, we show that steering model activations along these feature directions is sufficient to systematically modulate cultural-related knowledge generation, without retraining. Together, our results offer the first causal evidence that LLMs encode cultural knowledge as decoupled semantic structures rather than surface patterns, enabling a scalable pathway toward cultural alignment through mechanistic intervention. Code is available at https://github.com/IAN-YE/Cultural-features-SAE.

Deciphering Cultural Representations in Large Language Models via Sparse Autoencoders

Vision-language models (VLMs) have been explored for visual programming, where they generate code to solve visual tasks. However, most prior work focuses on visual programming for productivity; it remains unclear how well current VLMs perform on education-oriented visual programming and what factors limit their performance. To bridge this gap, we introduce TURTLEAI, a benchmark containing 823 tasks curated based on real-world visual programming tasks in the Turtle Graphics domain. Solving these tasks requires models to perceive geometric patterns, reason about spatial relationships, and synthesize Python code that faithfully reproduces geometric patterns. We evaluate 20+ VLMs, including GPT-5, GPT-4o, and Qwen2-VL-72B, and find that they struggle significantly, with most achieving success rates below 30%. To address these limitations, we propose a data generation technique that requires only a small set of seed samples. Fine-tuning Qwen2-VL-72B on the resulting synthetic data yields an improvement of about 20% on real-world tasks. Our failure analysis reveals that GPT-4o struggles with spatial reasoning and precise visual replication, whereas fine-tuning primarily improves the alignment between visual reasoning and code implementation.

TURTLEAI: Benchmarking Multimodal Models for Visual Programming in Turtle Graphics

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in human-centric applications, yet they often fail to provide substantive emotional support. While Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been utilized to enhance empathy of LLMs, existing reward models typically evaluate empathy from a single perspective, overlooking the inherently bidirectional interaction nature of empathy between the supporter and seeker as defined by Empathy Cycle theory. To address this limitation, we propose Psychology-grounded Empathetic Reward Modeling (PERM). PERM operationalizes empathy evaluation through a bidirectional decomposition: 1) Supporter perspective, assessing internal resonation and communicative expression; 2) Seeker perspective, evaluating emotional reception. Additionally, it incorporates a bystander perspective to monitor overall interaction quality. Extensive experiments on a widely-used emotional intelligence benchmark and an industrial daily conversation dataset demonstrate that PERM outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by over 10%. Furthermore, a blinded user study reveals a 70% preference for our approach, highlighting its efficacy in generating more empathetic responses.

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BV-Blend: Uncertainty-Weighted Historical Baselines for Stable Critic-Free RL with Verifiable Rewards

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Text-to-OverpassQL: A Natural Language Interface for Complex Geodata Querying of OpenStreetMap