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Training large language models for domain adaptation poses a significant challenge in balancing the acquisition of domain knowledge with the retention of general abilities, often leading to catastrophic forgetting. While curriculum learning offers a promising direction, conventional methods typically rely on a single dimension of knowledge or task, which is insufficient to navigate the trade-off between knowledge breadth and task depth. In this paper, we propose a two-dimensional curriculum learning framework that coordinates model training along two orthogonal axes: the knowledge dimension and the task dimension. We first reconstruct the dataset by clustering instances according to their semantic similarity to general-domain data, and subsequently annotate them with a task hierarchy. Then, we design an integrated curriculum that develops from general to domain-specific knowledge clusters, and within each cluster, from lower- to higher-order cognitive tasks. Compared with the second-best method, our method improves accuracy on medical evaluations by 2.49\% and on financial evaluations by 1.2\%. Ablation and cross-domain experiments further demonstrate our method as a scalable and effective framework for structured domain adaptation in large language model fine-tuning. We have released the code in an anonymous repository at https://github.com/Melo-1017/Balancing-Knowledge-Breadth-and-Task-Depth.

ACL 2026

Balancing Knowledge Breadth and Task Depth for Effective Domain Adaptation Fine-Tuning

## Welcome to EMNLP 2022!
I am delighted to welcome you to EMNLP 2022! I believe this conference has been complicated beyond any precedent. Over the past year, it’s been thrilling to see the organization team approach each new puzzle with creativity and enthusiasm. We hope that those participating in Abu Dhabi as well as those joining remotely will leave the conference feeling newly inspired by the program and newly connected to our ever-growing community. Following EMNLP 2021 and major NLP conferences since, EMNLP 2022 is “hybrid,” serving both virtual and in-person participants.

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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.

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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.

Dense retrievers in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems exhibit systematic biases---including brevity, position, literal matching, and repetition biases---that can compromise retrieval quality. Query rewriting techniques are now standard in RAG pipelines, yet their impact on these biases remains unexplored. We present the first systematic study of how query enhancement techniques affect dense retrieval biases, evaluating five methods across six retrievers. Our findings reveal that simple LLM-based rewriting achieves the strongest aggregate bias reduction (54%), yet fails under adversarial conditions where multiple biases combine. Mechanistic analysis uncovers two distinct mechanisms: simple rewriting reduces bias through increased score variance, while pseudo-document methods achieve reduction through genuine decorrelation from bias-inducing features. However, no technique uniformly addresses all biases, and effects vary substantially across retrievers. Our results provide practical guidance for selecting query enhancement strategies based on specific bias vulnerabilities. More broadly, we establish a taxonomy distinguishing query-document interaction biases from document encoding biases, clarifying the limits of query-side interventions for debiasing RAG systems.

 Masking or Mitigating? Deconstructing the Impact of Query Rewriting on Retriever Biases in RAG

As Large Language Models asymptotically approach human-level fluency in natural language generation, solely relying on surface-level semantic artifacts for detecting LLM-generated texts has become increasingly precarious. Existing detectors often falter when facing three critical challenges: adversarial perturbations, cross-domain shifts, and the rapid temporal evolution of the foundation model. To address these issues, we propose \wavedetect, a novel framework that reformulates text detection as a signal processing task within the time-frequency domain. Unlike previous methods that analyze static token probability distributions, \wavedetect models the generated output as a probability signal, upon which a differentiable Continuous Wavelet Transform is applied to convert them into learnable spectral representations. This process reveals the intrinsic ``spectral fingerprints'' in machine-generated texts--patterns that remain invisible in time domain. Comprehensive evaluations on three well-curated datasets (RAID, EvoBench, and Domain-Shift) show that our method achieves a new state-of-the-art. It not only achieves superior accuracy but also exhibits remarkable robustness against sophisticated attacks, generalization across out-of-distribution topics and unseen evolving LLMs. Our results validate the efficacy of spectral analysis as a promising paradigm for LLM-generated texts detection.

WaveDetect: Robust Framework for Machine-Generated Text Detection via Wavelet Transform

The reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly attributed to training data quality rather than mere parameter scaling. However, existing data-centric paradigms often equate quality with factuality or diversity and ignore the internal logical complexity of training samples. In this work, we propose that natural language harbors Structured Logical Knowledge manifested through entailment relationships and logical topologies. To quantify this, we introduce Structured Logical Knowledge Density (SLKD), a novel metric that measures logical information content by decomposing natural language into executable predicates and logical primitives. Our analysis reveals a significant logical disparity in current datasets where sparse logical signals predominate. Consequently, we propose a density-aware re-cognizing optimization strategy that prioritizes high-density logical samples to align training with the model's reasoning boundary. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach enhances reasoning performance and generalization without increasing total data volume. These results, further validated within a reinforcement learning framework, suggest that elevating logical density is more critical than expanding data scale for realizing the full cognitive potential of LLMs. The anonymized code is available in the Appendix C.

Logical Structure as Knowledge: Enhancing LLM Reasoning via Structured Logical Knowledge Density Estimation

Modern large language models (LLMs) are typically trained and deployed using structured role tags (e.g. system, user, assistant, tool) that explicitly mark the source of each piece of context. While these tags are essential for instruction following and controllability, asymmetries in the training data associated with different role tags can potentially introduce inductive biases. In this paper, we study this phenomenon by formalizing user–assistant bias, defined as the tendency of an LLM to preferentially rely on information from either the user or assistant role when they provide incompatible information about the same entity in the context history. We introduce a task-agnostic benchmark UserAssist and evaluate such bias in 52 frontier models. We observe that most of the instruction-tuned models exhibit strong user bias, whereas base and reasoning models are close to neutral. Using controlled fine-tuning experiments, we isolate which post-training recipes drive the observed user–assistant bias. We find that human-preference alignment amplifies user bias, while reasoning fine-tuning reduces it. Finally, we show that user–assistant bias can be bidirectionally controlled via direct preference optimization (DPO) on UserAssist-train, and that the resulting bias reliably generalizes to two realistic multi-turn debate datasets spanning philosophical opinions and natural argumentative exchanges on factual/policy topics. These results reveal an underexplored consequence of role-tagged training and provide a principled framework to diagnose and control tag-induced biases in modern LLMs.

 User-Assistant Bias in LLMs

While Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit exceptional zero-shot relevance modeling, their high computational cost necessitates framing passage retrieval as a budget-constrained global optimization problem. Existing approaches passively rely on first-stage dense retrievers, which leads to two limitations: (1) failing to retrieve relevant passages in semantically distinct clusters, and (2) failing to propagate relevance signals to the broader corpus. To address these limitations, we propose Bayesian Active Learning with Gaussian Processes guided by LLM relevance scoring (BAGEL), a novel framework that propagates sparse LLM relevance signals across the embedding space to guide global exploration. BAGEL models the multimodal relevance distribution across the entire embedding space with a query-specific Gaussian Process (GP) based on LLM relevance scores. Subsequently, it iteratively selects passages for scoring by strategically balancing the exploitation of high-confidence regions with the exploration of uncertain areas. Extensive experiments across four benchmark datasets and two LLM backbones demonstrate that BAGEL effectively explores and captures complex relevance distributions and outperforms LLM reranking methods under the same LLM budget on all four datasets.

Bayesian Active Learning with Gaussian Processes Guided by LLM Relevance Scoring for Dense Passage Retrieval

Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly rely on long-form, multi-step reasoning to solve complex tasks such as mathematical problem solving and scientific question answering. Despite strong performance, existing confidence estimation methods typically reduce an entire reasoning process to a single scalar score, ignoring how confidence evolves throughout the generation. As a result, these methods are often sensitive to superficial factors such as response length or verbosity, and struggle to distinguish correct reasoning from confidently stated errors. We propose to characterize the stepwise confidence signal using Signal Temporal Logic (STL). Using a discriminative STL mining procedure, we discover temporal formulas that distinguish confidence signals of correct and incorrect responses. Our analysis found that the STL patterns generalize across tasks, and numeric parameters exhibit sensitivity to individual questions. Based on these insights, we develop a confidence estimation approach that informs STL blocks with parameter hypernetworks. Experiments on multiple reasoning tasks show our confidence scores are more calibrated than the baselines.

Confidence over Time: Confidence Calibration with Temporal Logic for Large Language Model Reasoning

Current safety evaluations of large language models (LLMs) create a dangerous illusion of universal protection by aggregating harms under generic categories such as "Identity Hate", obscuring vulnerabilities toward specific populations. In this work, we expose the Selective Safety Trap: a systemic failure mode where models robustly defend specific populations while leaving underrepresented communities highly vulnerable to identical adversarial attacks. To systematically audit this phenomenon, we introduce MiJaBench, a bilingual (English–Portuguese) adversarial benchmark comprising 43,961 controlled jailbreaking prompts across 16 minority groups. By evaluating 14 state-of-the-art LLMs on MiJaBench, we curate 615,454 prompt-response pairs that compose MiJaBench-Align, revealing that safety alignment is not a uniform semantic capability but a demographic hierarchy, with defense rates fluctuating by up to 42% within the same model solely based on the target group. This disparity persists across architectures and languages and is amplified by scaling, indicating that current alignment methods learn group-specific safeguards rather than a generalized notion of harm. Through targeted direct preference optimization (DPO) on a 1B-parameter baseline, we achieve strong zero-shot safety generalizations to entirely unseen demographics and complex attack strategies. We release all datasets and scripts to provide the community with a concrete pathway toward equitable, transferable safety alignment.

 Safety Is Not Universal: The Selective Safety Trap in LLM Alignment

Can small language models achieve strong tool-use performance without complex adaptation mechanisms? This paper investigates this question through Meta-Tool, a controlled empirical study comparing hypernetwork-based LoRA adaptation against carefully designed few-shot prompting. Using a Llama-3.2-3B-Instruct backbone, we evaluate four adaptation mechanisms—few-shot prompting, documentation encoding, hypernetwork-generated LoRA weights, and value-guided beam search—across four diverse benchmarks: Gorilla APIBench, Spider 2.0, WebArena, and InterCode. Our central finding is a well-supported negative result: despite generating non-trivial weight matrices, the 227.8M-parameter hypernetwork provides no measurable improvement over few-shot prompting alone. Comprehensive ablation studies reveal that few-shot examples contribute +21.5\% to performance and documentation contributes +5.0\%, while the hypernetwork adds 0\%. A 3B model with well-designed prompts achieves 79.7\% of GPT-5's average performance at $10 \times$ lower latency. Error analysis across 722 failure cases spanning all shot counts (0–5) shows that at the 5-shot configuration (106 failures), failure modes are task-dependent: schema-heavy tasks (Spider 2.0, WebArena) show near-zero format errors with remaining failures semantic, while format errors dominate on Gorilla (100\%) and InterCode (70\%). These findings redirect practitioners toward prompt engineering and example curation rather than complex adaptation architectures.

Meta-Tool: Efficient Few-Shot Tool Adaptation for Small Language Models

We present MTRAG-UN, a benchmark for exploring open challenges in multi-turn retrieval augment generation, a popular use of large language models. We release a benchmark of 666 tasks from 666 conversations containing over 2,800 conversation turns across 6 domains with accompanying corpora. Our experiments show that retrieval and generation models continue to struggle on conversations with UNanswerable, UNderspecified, and NONstandalone questions and UNclear responses. Our benchmark is available at https://github.com/IBM/mt-rag-benchmark

MTRAG-UN: A Benchmark for Open Challenges in Multi-Turn RAG Conversations

Not Safe for Work (NSFW) image classifiers play a critical role in safeguarding text-to-image (T2I) systems. However, a concerning phenomenon has emerged in T2I systems -- changes in text prompts that manipulate benign image elements can result in failed detection by NSFW classifiers -- dubbed "*context shifts*." For instance, while a NSFW image of "*a nude person in an empty scene*" can be easily blocked by most NSFW classifiers, a stealthier one that depicts "*a nude person blending in a group of dressed people*" may evade detection. We ask: how to systematically reveal NSFW image classifiers' failure against such context shifts?

Towards this end, we present an automated red-teaming framework that leverages a set of generative AI tools. We propose an **exploration-exploitation** approach: **First**, in the *exploration* stage, we synthesize a diverse and massive 36K NSFW image dataset that facilitates our study of context shifts. We find that varying fractions (e.g., 4.1% to 36% nude and sexual content) of the dataset are misclassified by NSFW image classifiers like GPT-4o and Gemini. **Second**, in the *exploitation* stage, we leverage these failure cases to train a specialized LLM that rewrites unseen seed prompts into more evasive versions, increasing the likelihood of detection evasion by up to 6 times. Alarmingly, we show **these failures translate to real-world T2I and even T2V systems** like DALL-E 3, Sora, Nano Banana, and Veo 3 -- beyond the open-weight image generators in our main study. For example, querying DALL-E 3 with prompts rewritten by our approach increases the chance of obtaining NSFW images from 0 to over 50%.

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Masking or Mitigating? Deconstructing the Impact of Query Rewriting on Retriever Biases in RAG

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