United States

Safety guardrails in large language models (LLMs) are developed to prevent malicious users from generating toxic content at a large scale. However, these measures can inadvertently introduce or reflect new biases, as LLMs may refuse to generate harmful content targeting some demographic groups and not others. We explore this selective refusal bias in LLM guardrails through the lens of refusal rates of targeted individual and intersectional demographic groups, types of LLM responses, and length of generated refusals. Our results show evidence of selective refusal bias across gender, sexual orientation, nationality, and religion attributes. This leads us to investigate additional safety implications via an indirect attack, where we target previously refused groups, and find that Llama 3.1 fails to defend against our attack in roughly 89% of the trials. Our findings emphasize the need for more equitable and robust performance in safety guardrails across demographic groups.

ACL 2026

 Characterizing Selective Refusal Bias in Large Language Models

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.

poster

Knowledge-Based Visual Question Answering (KB-VQA) requires grounding visual queries to external knowledge beyond directly observable content in images.
While recent multi modal large language models (MLLMs) show strong perceptual abilities, they struggle on KB-VQA tasks requiring groundings from both fine-grained entity and evidence levels.
Most existing multi-modal retrieval augmented generation (MM-RAG) methods tightly couple entity discrimination and section-level evidence ranking into a single re-ranking stage, leading to high cost and limited generalization.
In this work, we revisit existing MM-RAG solutions from a workflow perspective and argue both entity-level and fact-level groundings are key bottlenecks.
We observe that although MLLMs often fail under open-ended entity naming, they can better identify the correct entity when selecting from a small set of candidate names.
Based on this insight, we propose a simple and training-free identify-before-answer IBA framework that decouples entity identification from section-level re-ranking.
Our approach prompts an MLLM to select high-confidence entities using only candidate names, followed by an off-the-shelf textual re-ranker for evidence selection.
Experiments on Encyclopedic-VQA and InfoSeek show that our method consistently outperforms fine-tuned multi-modal re-ranking baselines while reducing training and inference complexity.
Additional analyses reveal that the improvements arise not only from better entity identification, but also from selecting more informative evidence once correct entity is fixed.
Our implementation is made public to ease reproducibility

Ground Then Rank: Revisiting Knowledge-Based VQA with Training-Free Entity Identification

We present a neuromuscular speech interface that translates silently voiced articulations directly into text. We record surface electromyographic (EMG) signals from multiple articulatory sites on the face and neck as participants *silently* articulate speech, enabling direct EMG-to-text translation. Such an interface has the potential to restore communication for individuals who have lost the ability to produce intelligible speech due to laryngectomy, neuromuscular disease, stroke, or trauma-induced damage (e.g., radiotherapy toxicity) to the speech articulators. Prior work has largely focused on mapping EMG collected during *audible* articulation to time-aligned audio targets or transferring these targets to *silent* EMG recordings, which inherently requires audio and limits applicability to patients who can no longer speak. In contrast, we propose an efficient representation of high-dimensional EMG signals and demonstrate direct sequence-to-sequence EMG-to-text conversion at the phonemic level without relying on time-aligned audio.

Non-invasive electromyographic speech neuroprosthesis: a geometric perspective

Understanding which parts of the retrieved context contribute to a large language model's generated answer is essential for building interpretable and trustworthy retrieval-augmented generation. We propose a novel framework that formulates context attribution as a combinatorial multi-armed bandit problem. We utilize Linear Thompson Sampling to efficiently identify the most influential context segments while minimizing the number of model queries. Our reward function leverages token log-probabilities to measure how well a subset of segments supports the original response, making it applicable to both open-source and black-box API-based models. Unlike SHAP and other perturbation-based methods that sample subsets uniformly, our approach adaptively prioritizes informative subsets based on posterior estimates of segment relevance, reducing computational costs. Experiments on multiple QA benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves up to 30% reduction in model queries while matching or exceeding the attribution quality of existing approaches.

Context Attribution with Multi-Armed Bandit Optimization

Recent progress in large language model (LLM) reasoning has focused on domains like mathematics and coding, where abundant high-quality data and objective evaluation metrics are readily available. In contrast, progress in scientific reasoning remains limited in domains such as medicine and materials science due to restricted dataset coverage and the inherent complexity of open-ended scientific questions. To address these challenges, we propose a general framework for sustainable scientific reasoning QA generation, and introduce WildSci, a new dataset of domain-specific science questions automatically synthesized from peer-reviewed literature, spanning 9 scientific disciplines and 26 subdomains. WildSci enables scalable training with well-defined reward signals in a multiple-choice format. We further apply reinforcement learning to finetune models on WildSci and analyze the resulting training dynamics, including domain-specific performance changes, response behaviors, and generalization trends. Experiments on a suite of scientific benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework and dataset. We release WildSci to enable scalable and sustainable research in scientific reasoning.

WildSci: Advancing Scientific Reasoning from In-the-Wild Literature

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for emotional support and mental health–related interactions outside clinical settings, yet little is known about how people evaluate and relate to these systems in everyday use. We analyze 5,126 Reddit posts from 47 mental health communities describing experiential or exploratory use of AI for emotional support or therapy. Grounded in the Technology Acceptance Model and therapeutic alliance theory, we develop a theory-informed annotation framework and apply a hybrid LLM–human pipeline to analyze evaluative language, adoption-related attitudes, and relational alignment at scale. Our results show that engagement is shaped primarily by narrated outcomes, trust, and response quality, rather than emotional bond alone. Positive sentiment is most strongly associated with task and goal alignment, while companionship-oriented use more often involves misaligned alliances and reported risks such as dependence and symptom escalation. Overall, this work demonstrates how theory-grounded constructs can be operationalized in large-scale discourse analysis and highlights the importance of studying how users interpret language technologies in sensitive, real-world contexts.

Like a Therapist, But Not: Reddit Narratives of AI in Mental Health Contexts

Inaccuracies in existing or generated clinical text may lead to serious adverse consequences, especially if it is a misdiagnosis or incorrect treatment suggestion. With Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly being used across diverse healthcare applications, comprehensive evaluation through dedicated benchmarks is crucial. However, such datasets remain scarce, especially across diverse languages and contexts. In this paper, we introduce MedErrBench, the first multilingual benchmark for error detection, localization, and correction, developed under the guidance of experienced clinicians. Based on an expanded taxonomy of ten common error types, MedErrBench covers English, Arabic and Chinese, with natural medical cases annotated and reviewed by domain experts. We assessed the performance of a range of general-purpose, language-specific, and medical-domain language models across all three tasks. Our results reveal notable performance gaps, particularly in non-English settings, highlighting the need for clinically grounded, language-aware systems. By making MedErrBench and our evaluation protocols publicly-available, we aim to advance multilingual clinical NLP to promote safer and more equitable AI-based healthcare globally. The dataset is publicly available at: https://github.com/congboma/MedErrBench.

MedErrBench: A Fine-Grained Multilingual Benchmark for Medical Error Detection and Correction with Clinical Expert Annotations

Existing video understanding benchmarks mainly emphasize general visual recognition and reasoning, but do not adequately capture the pedagogical logic embedded in instructional videos. To address this gap, we present PedagogyBench, a multimodal benchmark for instructional video understanding grounded in pedagogical cognition. We introduce a pedagogy-driven segmentation strategy and a dual-stream semantic injection pipeline that combines machine pre-annotation with expert refinement, enabling the construction of a dataset organized around a cognitive pyramid with four levels and 20 fine-grained tasks. We further propose the Cognitive Fidelity Score (CFS) to measure the balance of model performance across pedagogical cognitive dimensions. Experiments on 12 multimodal large language models reveal a clear generative gap, where models perform relatively well on discriminative tasks but degrade on higher-order pedagogical diagnosis, often relying on parametric memory rather than grounded visual perception. Project resources are available at https://github.com/Shallcom/PedagogyBench.

PedagogyBench: A Cognitive-Driven Benchmark for Multimodal Instructional Video Understanding

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) and Reinforcement Learning from Internal Feedback (RLIF) often fail to benefit from test-time compute due to entropy collapse and the resulting loss of reasoning diversity. We show that this collapse is driven not by uniform entropy decay, but by premature overconfidence at a small number of structurally critical decision points. Based on a token-level analysis of GRPO-style policy optimization, we propose SCOPE (Structural Collapse-aware Optimization via Partial Entropy control), which assigns each generated token a redistribution score and applies selective KL regularization to only the top $\sim 5$\% of tokens under this score. Across model scales and architectures on math reasoning benchmarks, SCOPE consistently improves performance under both RLVR and RLIF settings, demonstrating that targeted entropy control at a vanishingly small subset of tokens is sufficient to sustain reasoning diversity and effective test-time scaling.

A Few Bad Apples Spoil the Bunch: Preventing Global Entropy Collapse Driven by a Small Set of Tokens in LLM Reasoning

Large Language Models (LLMs) often struggle with computational efficiency and error propagation in multi-step reasoning tasks. While recent advancements on prompting and post-training have enabled LLMs to perform step-wise reasoning, they still tend to explore unproductive solution paths without effective backtracking or strategy adjustment. In this paper, we propose Meta-Reasoner, a new framework that empowers LLMs to ``think about how to think''. It optimizes the inference process by dynamically adapting reasoning strategies in real-time. Our approach employs contextual multi-armed bandits (CMABs) to learn an adaptive policy. It learns to evaluate the current state of LLM's reasoning and determine optimal strategy that is most likely to lead to a successful outcome during inference, like whether to backtrack, switch to a new approach, or restart the problem-solving process. This meta-guidance helps avoid unproductive paths exploration during inference and hence improves computational efficiency. We evaluate Meta-Reasoner on math problems (e.g., Game-of-24, TheoremQA) and scientific tasks (e.g., SciBench). Results show that our method outperform previous SOTA methods by 9-12% in accuracy, while reducing inference time by 28-35% under the same compute budget. Additional experiments on creative writing demonstrate the generalizability of our approach to diverse reasoning-intensive tasks.

 Meta-Reasoner: Dynamic Guidance for Optimized Inference-time Reasoning in Large Language Models

Post-training LLMs with Reinforcement Learning, specifically Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), has emerged as a paradigm for enhancing mathematical reasoning. However, standard GRPO relies on scalar correctness rewards that are often non-injective with respect to semantic content: distinct reasoning paths receive identical rewards. This leads to a Diversity-Quality Inconsistency, where the policy collapses into a narrow set of dominant modes while ignoring equally valid but structurally novel strategies.

To bridge this gap, we propose Diversity-aware Reward Adjustment (DRA), a theoretically grounded framework that calibrates the reward signal using the semantic density of sampled groups. By leveraging Submodular Mutual Information (SMI), DRA implements an Inverse Propensity Scoring (IPS) mechanism that effectively de-biases the gradient estimation. This creates a repulsive force against redundancy, driving the policy to achieve better coverage of the high-reward landscape.

Our method is plug-and-play and integrates seamlessly with GRPO variants. Empirical evaluations on five math benchmarks demonstrate that DRA-GRPO consistently outperforms strong baselines, achieving an average accuracy of 58.2% on DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B with only 7,000 training samples and $55 cost, highlighting the critical role of diversity calibration in data-efficient alignment.

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Next from ACL 2026

Ground Then Rank: Revisiting Knowledge-Based VQA with Training-Free Entity Identification

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