United States

Current safety evaluations of large language models (LLMs) create a dangerous illusion of universal protection by aggregating harms under generic categories such as &quot;Identity Hate&quot;, 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.

ACL 2026

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

### Welcome!
The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. Our Virtual Poster Sessions will take place online Thursday, August 22, 2024.

You are required to register for this event. **Please register [here](https://2024.aclweb.org/registration). **

If you have already registered, please check your inbox for an email from Underline granting you access to ACL 2024 content.

Please register!

ACL 2024

The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. More information will be announced soon.

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.

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. 
[Full Message from General Chair Philipp Koehn](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QiJFOmMjvDgsDo3i1XzlQnImxe3RU_Cy/view?usp=sharing) 
<html><button style="display: inline-flex; align-items: center; justify-content: center; white-space: nowrap; border-radius: 9999px; font-weight: bold; background: #7c3aed; color: white; font-family: 'Space Grotesk', sans-serif; height: 40px; font-size: 16px; padding: 0 20px; border: none; cursor: pointer" onclick="window.open('https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QiJFOmMjvDgsDo3i1XzlQnImxe3RU_Cy/view?usp=sharing')">Conference Handbook</button></html>

To access this event page, you need to log in with the **email address you registered with**. Access credentials will be sent to your email from Underline - subject line "Welcome to ACL 2026". Please be sure to check your spam email folder if you do not see an email confirmation right away.

To access this event page, you are required to register.
Please complete your registration to continue.

We recommend reading [**the registration information**](https://2026.aclweb.org/registration/) first.

**Online Registration Form**: https://acl.swoogo.com/acl2026

Registration Required

The 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026) will take place in San Diego, California, from July 2 - 7, 2026.

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%.

Red-Teaming NSFW Image Classifiers as Text-to-Image Safeguards

While most reading comprehension benchmarks for LLMs focus on factual information that can be answered by localizing specific textual evidence, many real-world tasks require understanding distributional information, such as population-level trends and preferences expressed across collections of text. We introduce Text2DistBench, a reading comprehension benchmark for evaluating LLMs’ ability to infer distributional knowledge from natural language. Built from real-world YouTube comments about movie and music entities, the benchmark provides models with entity metadata and associated comments, and requires them to answer distributional questions, such as estimating the proportions of positive and negative comments, or identifying the most and second most frequent topics discussed among viewers. To support reliable and long-term evaluation, the construction pipeline of Text2DistBench is fully automated and continuously updated to incorporate newly emerging entities over time. Experiments across multiple LLMs show that while models substantially outperform random baselines, performance varies widely across different distribution types and characteristics. These findings highlight both the capabilities and limitations of current LLMs in distributional reading comprehension and demonstrate the value of Text2DistBench as a practical and scalable testbed for future research.

Beyond Facts- Benchmarking Distributional Reading Comprehension in Large Language Models

The advent of LLMs has given rise to generative search, a new search paradigm in which LLMs retrieve information from the web related to a query and synthesize it into a single, coherent response. This paradigm differs fundamentally from traditional web search, where results are returned as a ranked list of independent web pages. In this paper, we ask: Along what dimensions does generative search differ from traditional search?
We conduct a systematic comparison between Google organic search and five generative search systems from three providers: Google, OpenAI, and Perplexity. Our analysis reveals substantial variation among engines in their reliance on internal v.s. external knowledge, source diversity, and stability. While generative systems often achieve topical coverage comparable to traditional search, they do so using markedly different retrieval footprints and synthesis strategies. We further show that the outputs of generative search can vary across time and executions, raising new challenges for robustness. Our findings demonstrate that generative search introduces new dimensions that are not captured by existing evaluation paradigms, motivating the development of evaluations that explicitly account for retrieval behavior, synthesis, and stability in generative search systems.

Characterizing Web Search in The Age of Generative AI

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across diverse domains. However, the reliability of responses from LLMs remains a question. Uncertainty quantification (UQ) of LLMs is crucial for ensuring their reliability, especially in areas such as healthcare. Existing UQ methods, often designed around a single resource such as Natural Language Inference (NLI) or graph-based metrics, fail to capture the multifaceted nature of uncertainty in natural language generation. In this work, we propose MS-UQ, a novel Multi-Resource Uncertainty Quantification framework that integrates heterogeneous uncertainty signals into a unified measure. Our approach concatenates matrices from diverse resources and employs tensor decomposition to orthogonally disentangle unique and shared information. To ensure scalability, we construct an adaptive ensemble of outputs from different decomposition methods, enabling the incorporation of new uncertainty sources. Experiments on CoQA, NQ_Open, and HotpotQA demonstrate that MS-UQ consistently outperforms existing methods, offering a comprehensive and scalable solution for uncertainty estimation in black-box LLMs and a more robust framework for enhancing LLM reliability in high-stakes applications. Our code can be accessed at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/MDUQ-First-202E/README.md.

Uncertainty Quantification of Large Language Models through Multiple Uncertainty Sources

Large language models (LLMs) acquire most of their knowledge during pretraining, which ties them to a fixed snapshot of the world and makes adaptation to continuously evolving knowledge challenging. As facts, entities, and events change over time, models may experience continuous knowledge drift, resulting not only in outdated predictions but also in temporally inconsistent reasoning. Although existing approaches, such as continual finetuning, knowledge editing, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), aim to update or supplement model knowledge, they are rarely evaluated in settings that reflect chronological, evolving, and real-world knowledge evolution. In this work, we introduce a new benchmark of real-world dynamic events, constructed from time-stamped evidence that captures how knowledge evolves over time, which enables systematic evaluation of model adaptation under continuous knowledge drift. The benchmark reveals that most existing methods, including vanilla RAG and several learning-based approaches, struggle under this setting, exposing critical limitations such as catastrophic forgetting and temporal inconsistency. To mitigate these limitations, we propose a time-aware retrieval baseline, Chronos, which progressively organizes retrieved evidence into an Event Evolution Graph to enable more temporally consistent understanding in LLMs without additional training. Overall, this work provides a foundation for analyzing and advancing LLM adaptation to continuous knowledge drift in realistic settings.

RAG or Learning? Understanding the Limits of LLM Adaptation under Continuous Knowledge Drift in the Real World

Reward Modeling is critical in evaluating and improving the generation of Large Language Models (LLMs). % They are typically trained on high-quality annotated datasets to distinguish between better and worse responses. While numerous recent works have shown its feasibility in improving safety, helpfulness, reasoning, and instruction-following ability, its capability and generalization to open-ended long-context generation is still rarely explored.
In this paper, we introduce OpenGenAlign, a framework and a high-quality dataset designed to develop reward models to evaluate and improve hallucination-free, comprehensive, reliable, and efficient open-ended long-context generation. We define four key metrics to assess generation quality and develop an automated pipeline to evaluate the outputs of multiple LLMs across long-context QA, Data-to-Text, and Summarization scenarios using o3, ending up with 33K high-quality preference data with a human agreement rate of 81%. Experimental results first demonstrate that existing reward models perform suboptimally on the held-out benchmark. And Our trained reward model achieves superior performance in the benchmark and effectively improves the generation quality of the policy models using Reinforcement Learning (RL). Additionally, OpenGenAlign could be used for effective guided generation in existing datasets. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the OpenGenAlign could be integrated with reward data from other domains to achieve better performance.

OpenGenAlign: A Preference Dataset and Benchmark for Trustworthy Reward Modeling in Open-Ended, Long-Context Generation

Large-language-model (LLM) agents are becoming competent at straightforward web tasks, such as opening an item page or submitting a form, but still struggle with objectives that require long-horizon navigation, large-scale information extraction, and reasoning under constraints. We present WebDART, a general framework that enables a single LLM to handle such complex chores. WebDART (i) dynamically decomposes each objective into three focused subtasks—navigation, information extraction, and execution—so the model concentrates on one skill at a time, and (ii) continuously re-plans the decomposition as new webpages are revealed, taking advantage of newly discovered filters or shortcuts and avoiding redundant exploration. Evaluated on WebChoreArena, WebDART lifts end-to-end success rates by up to 13.7 percentage points over previous state-of-the-art agents, while matching their performance on the easier WebArena suite and completing tasks with up to 14.7 fewer navigation steps. Code will be publicly available.

WebDART: Dynamic Decomposition and Re-planning for Complex Web Tasks

Reasoning in humans is prone to biases due to underlying motivations like identity protection, that undermine rational decision-making and judgment. This motivated reasoning at a collective level can be detrimental to society when debating critical issues such as human-driven climate change or vaccine safety, and can further aggravate political polarization. Prior studies have reported that large language models (LLMs) are also susceptible to human-like cognitive biases, however, the extent to which LLMs selectively reason toward identity-congruent conclusions remains largely unexplored. Here, we investigate whether assigning 8 personas across 4 political and socio-demographic attributes induces motivated reasoning in LLMs. Testing 8 LLMs (open source and proprietary) across two reasoning tasks from human-subject studies --- veracity discernment of misinformation headlines and evaluation of numeric scientific evidence --- we find that persona-assigned LLMs have up to 9% reduced veracity discernment relative to models without personas. Political personas specifically are up to 90% more likely to correctly evaluate scientific evidence on gun control when the ground truth is congruent with their induced political identity. Prompt-based debiasing methods are largely ineffective at mitigating these effects. Taken together, our empirical findings are the first to suggest that persona-assigned LLMs exhibit human-like motivated reasoning that is hard to mitigate through conventional debiasing prompts --- raising concerns of exacerbating identity-congruent reasoning in both LLMs and humans.

Downloads

Next from ACL 2026

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

Similar lecture

From Representational Harms to Quality-of-Service Harms: A Case Study on Llama 2 Safety Safeguards