United States

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.

ACL 2026

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

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The 2020 AAPT Virtual Summer Meeting brought together physics educators from around the globe to learn about the latest in physics theory, research methodology and education from leaders in their field. 

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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.

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) 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.

DRA-GRPO: Your GRPO Needs to Know Diverse Reasoning Paths for Mathematical Reasoning

While LLMs have demonstrated remarkable potential in Question Answering (QA), evaluating personalization remains a critical bottleneck. Existing paradigms predominantly rely on surface-level similarity or manual heuristics, often lacking sufficient data-driven validation. We address this by mining Community-Individual Preference Divergence (CIPD)—where individual choices override consensus—to distill six key personalization factors as evaluative dimensions. Accordingly, we introduce CoPA, a benchmark with 1,985 user profiles for fine-grained, factor-level assessment. By quantifying the alignment between model outputs and user-specific cognitive preferences inferred from interaction patterns, CoPA provides a more comprehensive and discriminative standard for evaluating personalized QA than generic metrics. The code is available at https://github.com/bjzgcai/CoPA.

CoPA: Benchmarking Personalized Question Answering with Data-Informed Cognitive Factors

Emotional interaction is increasingly crucial for conversational AI, yet current systems lack a self-emotion determination mechanism to drive the streaming text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis. We propose an emotion-planning framework that determines the emotion prior to the textual generation, grounding the downstream emotional TTS in a streaming manner. The framework is implemented by a plug-and-play LLM module, initialized from pretrained LLMs, and trained by reinforcement learning (RL) with emotions as the actions. A hybrid reward is employed which combines imitation signals with theory-driven scoring, in which the theory of Plutchik's wheel of emotions is adopted. By experiments on DailyDialog, EmoryNLP, IMEOCAP, and MELD, our method outperforms prompting and finetuning baselines on both emotion determination and response quality. We finally implement an entire streaming pipeline for real-time deployment, with the speech quality confirming the framework's emotional alignment, contextual coherence, and expressive fluency. Codes, cases, and demos are available in https://sixingdeguo.github.io/EmoQ-page/.

Self-EmoQ: Plutchik-Guided Value-based Planning to Drive Streaming Emotional TTS

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has been shown to be effective in eliciting structured reasoning (i.e., CoT reasoning) from large language models (LLMs). Regardless of its popularity, recent studies expose its failures in some reasoning tasks, raising fundamental questions about the nature of CoT reasoning. In this work, we propose a data distribution lens to understand when and why CoT reasoning succeeds or fails. We hypothesize that CoT reasoning reflects a structured inductive bias learned from in-distribution data, enabling models to conditionally generate reasoning trajectories that approximate those observed during training. As such, the effectiveness of CoT reasoning is fundamentally governed by the nature and degree of distribution discrepancy between training data and test queries. Guided by this lens, we dissect CoT reasoning via three dimensions: task, length, and format. To test the hypothesis, we introduce DataAlchemy, an abstract and fully controllable environment that trains LLMs from scratch and systematically probes them under various distribution conditions. Through rigorous controlled experiments, we reveal that CoT reasoning is a brittle mirage when it is pushed beyond training distributions, emphasizing the ongoing challenge of achieving genuine and generalizable reasoning.

Is Chain-of-Thought Reasoning of LLMs a Mirage? A Data Distribution Lens

Mid-training has become critical for enhancing the knowledge and reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs), especially through the utilization of large-scale synthetic data. However, existing data synthesis methods often generate simplistic and homogeneous QA pairs, with limited scale and diversity. To address this, we propose BoostQA, a novel framework designed to synthesize large-scale, diverse, and high-quality QA data for mid-training. BoostQA introduces model probes during mid-training for the first time and implements STEM-focused multi-grade synthesis to boost data diversity as well as high-difficulty synthesis to alleviate difficulty degradation, followed by answer refinement to further improve quality. Extensive experiments by mid-training Llama-3 8B demonstrate that using only 20B-token BoostQA data achieves a significant average improvement of **12.74%** on MMLU and CMMLU over the pre-training baseline. After mid-training on 500B tokens, including 100B-token BoostQA data, our model achieves SOTA average results across benchmarks among mainstream models of comparable size. BoostQA also demonstrates robust scalability, with performance consistently improving as model size, data volume, and initial FLOPs scale.

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