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Large language models exhibit a critical vulnerability to distractor interference in retrieval-augmented contexts: they fail to prioritize relevant, factually correct documents over topically similar but misleading content. We introduce Lat-Defuse, a mechanistic framework that corrects this failure mode through targeted interventions in the model&#39;s latent space. Using Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs), our method operates in an interpretable feature space and formulates correction as constrained counterfactual optimization. On Gemma-2 and Llama-3 model families across three QA benchmarks (BioASQ, Natural Questions, PopQA), our method achieves recovery rates of up to $94\%$ on distractor-vulnerable samples. Successful correction through sparse modifications reveals distractor interference as a localized, systematically addressable phenomenon, opening directions toward universal distractor robustness in LLMs.

ACL 2026

The Mechanics of Interference: Defusing Distractors in RAG via Sparse Autoencoder Interventions

## 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.

Our key innovations for EMNLP 2022 include:

* EMNLP 2022 is “hybrid” in a second sense, as well: we allowed both direct and rolling review paper submissions, building on the pilot experiment of EMNLP 2021, which considered a small number of ARR submissions. 
* Familiar from NAACL but new to EMNLP, we’ve added an industry track.
* During the conference, “portals” will link virtual poster sessions to in-person conference participants during poster sessions each day.
* The first ACL-family conference in the United Arab Emirates.

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***EMNLP 2022 General Chair***
 
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EMNLP 2022

Welcome!
EMNLP 2022 will take place in Abu Dhabi from December 7th to December 11th, 2022. And it will be held in hybrid mode, both online and offline.

Large language models exhibit a critical vulnerability to distractor interference in retrieval-augmented contexts: they fail to prioritize relevant, factually correct documents over topically similar but misleading content. We introduce Lat-Defuse, a mechanistic framework that corrects this failure mode through targeted interventions in the model's latent space. Using Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs), our method operates in an interpretable feature space and formulates correction as constrained counterfactual optimization. On Gemma-2 and Llama-3 model families across three QA benchmarks (BioASQ, Natural Questions, PopQA), our method achieves recovery rates of up to $94\%$ on distractor-vulnerable samples. Successful correction through sparse modifications reveals distractor interference as a localized, systematically addressable phenomenon, opening directions toward universal distractor robustness in LLMs.

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. 
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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.

AI agents operating on user interfaces must understand how interfaces communicate state and feedback to act reliably. As a core communicative modality, animations are increasingly used in modern interfaces, serving critical functional purposes beyond mere aesthetics. Thus, understanding UI animation is essential for comprehensive interface interpretation. However, recent studies of Vision Language Models (VLMs) for UI understanding have focused primarily on static screenshots, leaving it unclear how well these models handle dynamic UI animations. To address this gap, we created AniMINT, a novel dataset of 300 densely annotated UI animation videos.
We systematically evaluate state-of-the-art VLMs on UI animation understanding, including their abilities to perceive the animation effects, identify animation purposes, and interpret animation meaning. Our results show that VLMs can reliably detect primitive motion.
However, their high-level animation interpretation remains inconsistent, with substantial gaps relative to human performance. Finally, we use Motion, Context, and Perceptual Cues (MCPC) to probe factors affecting VLM performance, revealing key bottlenecks and directions for future improvement.

Beyond Screenshots: Evaluating VLMs' Understanding of UI Animations

The performance of large language models heavily depends on instruction tuning, especially on task types and mixture ratios. However, previous research has primarily focused on mixing tasks at fixed ratios, lacking a **systematic and quantitative analysis of task-wise interactions across diverse tasks**. Moreover, it has relied heavily on human labeling. To address these limitations, this study conducts empirical experiments on unlabeled instruction corpora, varying both the number and proportion of task combinations to identify effective mixtures. To minimize manual labeling, we automatically extract five representative tasks—programming, math problem solving, history question answering, grammar correction, and creative writing—using only a few seed instructions. Across 51 mixtures, we find that 1–2 task mixtures work best with small datasets, while synergistic 3-task mixtures excel with larger data. Task interactions reveal both synergy (e.g., programming + math) and interference (e.g., programming + creative writing). These results provide practical guidelines for mixture design tailored to model scale and data size.

Empirical Analysis of Task Mixture Effects in Small-scale Instruction Tuning: A Statistical Approach

Parallel scaling has emerged as a powerful paradigm to enhance reasoning capabilities in large language models (LLMs) by generating multiple Chain-of-Thought (CoT) traces simultaneously. However, this approach introduces significant computational inefficiency due to *inter-trace redundancy*---our analysis reveals that over 80% of parallel reasoning traces yield identical final answers, representing substantial wasted computation. To address this critical efficiency bottleneck, we propose **DeepPrune**, a novel framework that enables efficient parallel scaling through dynamic pruning. Our method features a specialized judge model trained with oversampling techniques to accurately predict answer equivalence from partial reasoning traces, achieving 0.7072 AUROC on equivalence prediction across unseen reasoning models. This is combined with an online greedy clustering algorithm that dynamically prunes redundant paths while preserving answer diversity. Comprehensive evaluations across three challenging benchmarks (AIME 2024, AIME 2025, and GPQA) and multiple reasoning models demonstrate that DeepPrune achieves remarkable token reduction ranging from 65.73% to 88.50% compared to conventional consensus sampling, while maintaining competitive accuracy within 3.4 percentage points. Our work establishes a new standard for efficient parallel reasoning, making high-performance reasoning more efficient. Our code and data are here: https://github.com/THU-KEG/DeepPrune/

DeepPrune: Parallel Scaling without Inter-trace Redundancy

Large language models often hallucinate, producing content that is factually incorrect or not grounded in the sources. Reliable faithfulness verification is critical for trustworthy deployment. In the provided-source (closed-world) setting, existing verifiers either classify whole passages in one step or check sentences independently, overlooking cross-sentence context. We present ContextCheck, a framework for sentence-level faithfulness verification with context-aware disambiguation. Each sentence is verified against the grounding document while conditioning on preceding sentences, enabling pronouns and references to be resolved directly in context. This design avoids the separate decontextualization step of rewriting claims into self-contained forms, casting verification as a context-conditioned task. Fine-tuned from Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct, ContextCheck sets a new state of the art on three context-dependent datasets; it improves Macro F1 by over 10 points compared to the strongest baselines, and matches or slightly surpasses the strongest baselines on 14 standard single-sentence datasets compared to prior 8B-scale verifiers (average Macro F1 73.5 vs. 72.8). These results show that ContextCheck offers a practical and effective approach for sentence-level hallucination detection.

 ContextCheck: Sentence-Level Faithfulness Verification with Context-Aware Disambiguation

Large language models (LLMs) face a critical alignment challenge: balancing safety with helpfulness. Excessive safety can lead to over-refusal, where models reject harmful-looking yet benign queries, severely limiting utility.
Existing training-free interventions offer an efficient way to mitigate over-refusal without re-training, but suffer from high inference overhead and architecture dependency. Our work explores a complementary direction: rather than applying post-hoc corrections to model outputs, our goal is to intrinsically reshape the distributions of harmful and benign samples within the model’s decision space. 
In this paper, we argue that a lightweight training-based approach can more effectively distinguish between harmful and benign samples. We propose Single Token Alignment (STA), which optimizes only a single-token prefix (e.g., 4,096 parameters) while keeping the base model frozen. 
To address the inherent challenge of achieving robust refinement through such a minimal parameter interface, STA employs a mixed weighting mechanism integrated with its optimization objective. This mechanism incorporates hard weighting via stringent data filtering to provide clear, unbiased learning signals, and soft weighting through a focal mechanism to prioritize challenging cases.
Extensive experiments across 9 models and 10 datasets demonstrate that STA achieves a superior safety-helpfulness balance for LLMs, MLLMs, and reasoning models, offering a highly efficient and generalizable solution for refining safety alignment.

 You Only Need One Single Token to Refine Safety Alignment

As text-to-music models gain widespread adoption, the prompts used to guide these systems have become valuable intellectual property. This shift has given rise to a new form of attack: prompt stealing, aiming to reconstruct the high-value prompts that guide the music generation. However, unlike prior work in text and image generation, prompt stealing in text-to-music systems faces unique challenges due to the entangled and diffuse nature of semantic representations in audio, which complicates the decoupling of specific textual tokens from acoustic outputs. To address these challenges, we present AudioStealer, the first targeted study of prompt inversion in the audio domain. AudioStealer operates via a two-stage black-box attack framework: first, a heuristic search guided by audio-language embeddings identifies initial candidates; then, these candidates are refined using a game-theoretic strategy based on Shapley value estimation to attribute precise semantic contributions. Our method requires no direct access to the target model and relies solely on a shadow model, making it broadly applicable. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that AudioStealer recovers prompts with high textual consistency to the ground truth, while the regenerated audio maintains strong perceptual similarity to the target recordings. These results expose critical vulnerabilities in the text-to-audio market ecosystem and underscore the urgent need for intellectual property protections in generative audio technologies.

 AudioStealer: Extracting Audio Prompts via Shapley Value-Guided Query Search

As retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) tackles complex tasks, increasingly expanded contexts offer richer information, but at the cost of higher latency and increased cognitive load on the model. To mitigate this bottleneck, especially for intricate multi-hop questions, we introduce BRIEF-Pro. It is a universal, lightweight compressor that distills relevant evidence for a given query from retrieved documents into a concise summary for seamless integration into in-context RAG. Using seed data consisting of relatively short contexts (fewer than 1k words), BRIEF-Pro is trained to perform abstractive compression of extended contexts exceeding 10k words across a wide range of scenarios. Furthermore, BRIEF-Pro offers flexible user control over summary length by allowing users to specify the desired number of sentences. Experiments on four open-domain multi-hop question-answering datasets show that BRIEF-Pro generates more concise and relevant summaries, enhancing performance across small, large, and proprietary language models. With the 70B reader model, 32× compression by BRIEF-Pro improves QA performance by 4.67% on average over LongLLMLingua’s 9×, while requiring only 23% of its computational overhead.

BRIEF-Pro: Universal Context Compression with Short-to-Long Synthesis for Fast and Accurate Multi-Hop Reasoning

Framing theory posits that how information is presented shapes audience responses, but computational work has largely ignored audience reactions. While recent work has shown that article framing systematically shapes the content of reader responses, this paper asks: does framing also affect response quality? Analyzing 1M comments across 2.7K news articles, we operationalize quality as comment health. We find that article frames significantly predict comment health while controlling for topic, and that comments that adopt the article frame are healthier than those that depart from it. Further, unhealthy top-level comments tend to generate more unhealthy responses, independent of the frame being used in the comment. Our results establish a link between framing theory and discourse quality, laying the groundwork for downstream applications. We illustrate this potential with a pro-active frame-aware LLM- based system to mitigate unhealthy discourse.

Article and Comment Frames Shape the Quality of Online Comments

Qualitative analysis is essential for studying complex social and behavioral phenomena, yet existing large language model (LLM) approaches face key limitations. Fully automated pipelines often compromise methodological rigor, while fully manual coding remains costly and labor-intensive. Although recent work emphasizes human–AI collaboration, existing multi-agent systems focus primarily on theme-level outputs, provide limited human oversight, and overlook fine-grained, data-level coding quality.

We introduce \textbf{CentaurTA}, an iterative, self-improving human–agent framework for scalable thematic analysis. CentaurTA places humans in the loop to oversee and guide analysis, using expert feedback as a persistent learning signal to drive prompt-level refinement. By combining structured human feedback with rubric-based evaluation, CentaurTA provides fine-grained supervision for both open coding and theme construction while preserving methodological rigor. Experiments across multiple datasets, baselines, and LLM families show that CentaurTA improves coding alignment and transparency, highlighting the central role of human feedback in reliable qualitative analysis. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/Tom-Owl/CentaurTA.

CentaurTA: A Self-Improving Human-Agents Collaboration Framework for Thematic Analysis

The assessment of jailbreak attacks against large language models currently suffers from inconsistent evaluation criteria and methods, leading to unreliable estimates of attack success rates. We propose JailMeter, an evidence-based evaluation framework designed to more faithfully measure jailbreak effectiveness. Inspired by the Information Bottleneck theory, JailMeter applies dual-feedback optimization to filter jailbreak noise from model responses while preserving content relevant to the original malicious question. This process produces concise evidence for a rigorous assessment under which an attack is validated only when the response captures the malicious intent and delivers a complete answer, thereby signaling a substantive bypass of model safety alignment. We evaluate JailMeter on JailMeter-Eva, a challenging benchmark containing 330 human-labeled, non-rejected jailbreak instances. JailMeter achieves an accuracy of 97.27\%, substantially outperforming existing evaluation methods. To support large-scale evaluation, we further distill JailMeter into a small language model, JailMeter\textsubscript{SLM}, which maintains comparable reliability with significantly reduced computational costs. Code and dataset are available at \url{https://github.com/Magi2B0y/JailMeter}.

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