United States

Reward-guided search methods have demonstrated strong potential in enhancing tool-using agents by effectively guiding sampling and exploration over complex action spaces. As a core design, those search methods utilize process reward models (PRMs) to provide step-level rewards, enabling more fine-grained monitoring. However, there is a lack of systematic and reliable evaluation benchmarks for PRMs in tool-use settings. In this paper, we introduce ToolPRMBench, a large-scale benchmark specifically designed to evaluate PRMs for tool-using agents. ToolPRMBench is built on top of several representative tool-use benchmarks and converts agent trajectories into step-level test cases. Each case contains the interaction history, a correct action, a plausible but incorrect alternative, and relevant tool metadata. We respectively utilize offline sampling to isolate local single-step errors and online sampling to capture realistic multi-step failures from full agent rollouts. A multi-LLM verification pipeline is proposed to reduce label noise and ensure data quality. We conduct extensive experiments across large language models, general PRMs, and tool-specialized PRMs on ToolPRMBench. The results reveal clear differences in PRM effectiveness and highlight the potential of specialized PRMs for tool-using. Our code and dataset are available at: \url{https://github.com/David-Li0406/ToolPRMBench}\footnote{More resources on \textbf{LLM-as-a-judge} are on the website: \url{https://llm-as-a-judge.github.io}}.

ACL 2026

 ToolPRMBench: Evaluating and Advancing Process Reward Models for Tool-using Agents

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

Using LLMs not to predict plans but to formalize an environment into the Planning Domain Definition Language (PDDL) has been shown to improve performance and control. While most existing methodology only applies to fully observable environments, we adapt to the more realistic and challenging partially observable environments without sufficient information to make a complete plan. We propose PDDLego+, a framework to iteratively formalize, plan, grow, and refine PDDL representations by decomposing the environment and the goal into fully observable episodes. Without fine‑tuning, in-context exemplars, or trajectories, PDDLego+ improves planning success and exhibits robustness against problem complexity compared to end-to-end approaches. We also show that the domain knowledge captured after a successful trial can benefit future tasks.

Iterative Formalization and Planning in Partially Observable Environments

Retrieving relevant tables from extensive databases for a given natural language query is essential for accurately answering questions in tasks such as text-to-SQL. Existing table retrieval approaches select a pre-determined set of $k$ tables with the highest similarity to the query. However, the number of required tables varies across queries and cannot be known in advance. Enforcing a fixed number of retrieved tables regardless of the query may either retrieve an undersized set, failing to obtain all necessary evidence, or retrieve an oversized pool, including irrelevant tables. To address this issue, we propose an adaptive table retrieval method that adjusts the number of tables retrieved according to the requirements of each query. Specifically, we utilize an adaptive thresholding mechanism to selectively retrieve tables and integrate a sliding-window reranking algorithm to efficiently process a large table corpus. Extensive experiments on Spider, BIRD, and Spider 2.0 demonstrate that our method effectively addresses the limitations of the top-$k$ retrieval strategy, improving performance in retrieval and downstream tasks. Our code and data are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Adaptive-Table-Retrieval.

Retrieve Only Relevant Tables Whether Few or Many: Adaptive Table Retrieval Method

Code-switching is a pervasive linguistic phenomenon in global communication, yet modern information retrieval systems remain predominantly designed for, and evaluated within, monolingual contexts. To bridge this critical disconnect, we present a holistic study dedicated to code-switching IR. We introduce CSR-L (Code-Switching Retrieval benchmark-Lite), constructing a dataset via human annotation to capture the authentic naturalness of mixed-language queries. Our evaluation across statistical, dense, and late-interaction paradigms reveals that code-switching acts as a fundamental performance bottleneck, degrading the effectiveness of even robust multilingual models. We demonstrate that this failure stems from substantial divergence in the embedding space between pure and code-switched text. Scaling this investigation, we propose CS-MTEB, a comprehensive benchmark covering 11 diverse tasks, where we observe performance declines of up to 27%. Finally, we show that standard multilingual techniques like vocabulary expansion are insufficient to resolve these deficits completely. These findings underscore the fragility of current systems and establish code-switching as a crucial frontier for future IR optimization.

Code-Switching Information Retrieval: Benchmarks, Analysis, and the Limits of Current Retrievers

Visually Rich Document Understanding (VRDU) has become a pivotal area of research, driven by the need to automatically interpret documents that contain intricate visual, textual, and structural elements. Recently, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated significant promise in this domain, including both OCR-based and OCR-free approaches for information extraction from document images. This survey reviews recent advances in MLLM-based VRDU, highlighting emerging trends and promising research directions with a focus on two key aspects: (1) techniques for representing and integrating textual, visual, and layout features; (2) training paradigms, including pretraining, instruction tuning, and training strategies. Moreover, we address challenges such as data scarcity, handling multi-page and multilingual documents, and integrating emerging trends such as Retrieval-Augmented Generation and agentic frameworks. Our analysis offers a roadmap for advancing MLLM-based VRDU toward more scalable, reliable, and adaptable systems.

A Survey on MLLM-based Visually Rich Document Understanding: Methods, Challenges, and Emerging Trends

Large language models (LLMs) have recently enabled remarkable progress in text representation. However, their embeddings are typically high-dimensional, leading to substantial storage and retrieval overhead. Although recent approaches such as Matryoshka Representation Learning (MRL) and Contrastive Sparse Representation (CSR) alleviate these issues to some extent, they still suffer from retrieval accuracy degradation. This paper proposes Isolation Kernel Embedding or IKE, a learning-free method that transforms an LLM embedding into a binary embedding using Isolation Kernel (IK). Lightweight and based on binary encoding, IKE offers a low memory footprint and fast bitwise computation, lowering retrieval latency. Experiments on multiple text retrieval datasets demonstrate that IKE offers up to 16.7$\times$ faster retrieval and 16$\times$ lower memory usage than the original LLM embeddings, while maintaining comparable accuracy. Theoretically, we show that IKE works because it satisfies four essential criteria for effective binary hashing that other methods do not possess. Compared to CSR, IKE consistently achieves better retrieval efficiency and effectiveness. IKE also works effectively with graph-based indexing, demonstrating its superiority in balancing accuracy and latency compared to alternative compression techniques in the approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) search setting.

LLMs Meet Isolation Kernel: Lightweight, Learning-free Binary Embeddings for Fast Retrieval

Recent advances in mobile Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents highlight the growing need for comprehensive evaluation benchmarks. While new online benchmarks offer more realistic testing than offline ones, they tend to focus on the agents' task instruction-following ability while neglecting their reasoning and exploration ability. Moreover, these benchmarks do not consider the random noise in real-world mobile environments. This leads to a gap between benchmarks and real-world environments. To addressing these limitations, we propose MobileBench-OL, an online benchmark with 1080 tasks from 80 Chinese apps. It measures task execution, complex reasoning, and noise robustness of agents by including 5 subsets, which set multiple evaluation dimensions. We also provide an auto-eval framework with a reset mechanism, enabling stable and repeatable real-world benchmarking. Evaluating 13 leading GUI agents on MobileBench-OL shows significant room for improvement to meet real-world requirements. Human evaluation further confirms that MobileBench-OL can reliably measure the performance of leading GUI agents in real environments.

MobileBench-OL: A Comprehensive Chinese Benchmark for Evaluating Mobile GUI Agents in Real-World Environment

While Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate fluent and convincing responses, they are not necessarily correct. This is especially apparent in the popular decompose-then-verify factuality evaluation pipeline, where LLMs evaluate generated text by decomposing it into individual, valid claims. 
Factuality evaluation is especially important for medical answers, since incorrect medical information could seriously harm the patient. However, existing factuality systems are a poor match for the medical domain, as they are typically only evaluated on objective, entity-centric, formulaic texts such as biographies and historical topics. This differs from condition-dependent, conversational, hypothetical, sentence-structure diverse, and subjective medical answers, making decomposition into valid facts challenging. We propose MedScore, a new pipeline to decompose medical answers into condition-aware valid facts and verify against in-domain corpora. Our method extracts up to three times as many valid facts as existing methods, reducing hallucination and vague references, and retaining condition-dependency in facts. We also find MedScore is generalizable to non-medical domains without any specific tuning. The resulting factuality score substantially varies by decomposition method, verification corpus, and used backbone LLM, highlighting the importance of customizing each step for reliable factuality evaluation by using our generalizable and modularized pipeline for domain adaptation.

 MedScore: Generalizable Factuality Evaluation of Open-ended Long-form Medical Answers by Domain-adapted Claim Decomposition and Verification

Multilingual retrieval-augmented generation (MRAG) requires models to effectively acquire and integrate beneficial external knowledge from multilingual collections. However, most existing studies employ a unitive process where queries of equivalent semantics across different languages are processed through a single-turn retrieval and subsequent optimization. Such a ``one-size-fits-all'' strategy is often suboptimal in multilingual settings, as the models occur to knowledge bias and conflict during the interaction with the search engine. To alleviate the issues, we propose LcRL, a multilingual search-augmented reinforcement learning framework that integrates a language-coupled Group Relative Policy Optimization into the policy and reward models. We adopt the language-coupled group sampling in the rollout module to reduce knowledge bias, and regularize an auxiliary anti-consistency penalty in the reward models to mitigate the knowledge conflict. Experimental results demonstrate that \ours~not only achieves competitive performance but is also appropriate for various practical scenarios such as constrained training data and retrieval over collections encompassing a large number of languages. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/LcRL-B4EF.

 Language-Coupled Reinforcement Learning for Multilingual Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) hold significant promise for revolutionizing traditional education and reducing teachers' workload. However, accurately interpreting unconstrained STEM student handwritten solutions with intertwined mathematical formulas, diagrams, and textual reasoning poses a significant challenge due to the lack of authentic and domain-specific benchmarks. Additionally, current evaluation paradigms predominantly rely on the outcomes of downstream tasks (e.g., auto-grading), which often probe only a subset of the recognized content, thereby failing to capture the MLLMs' understanding of complex handwritten logic as a whole. To bridge this gap, we release EDU-CIRCUIT-HW, a dataset consisting of 1,300+ authentic student handwritten solutions from a university-level STEM course. Utilizing the expert-verified verbatim transcriptions and grading reports of student solutions, we simultaneously evaluate various MLLMs’ upstream recognition fidelity and downstream auto-grading performance. Our evaluation uncovers an astonishing scale of latent failures within MLLM-recognized student handwritten content, highlighting the models' insufficient reliability for auto-grading and other understanding-oriented applications in high-stakes educational settings. In response, we present a case study demonstrating that leveraging identified error patterns to preemptively detect and rectify recognition errors, with only minimal human intervention (e.g., with 3.3% assignments routed to human graders while the rest to GPT-5.1 grader), can effectively enhance the robustness of the deployed AI-enabled grading system on unseen student solutions.

EDU-CIRCUIT-HW: Evaluating Multimodal Large Language Models on Real-World University-Level STEM Student Handwritten Solutions

Accurate question answering (QA) in disaster management requires reasoning over uncertain and conflicting information, a setting poorly captured by existing benchmarks built on clean evidence. We introduce DisastQA, a rigorously verified benchmark of 3,000 expert-annotated questions (2,000 multiple-choice and 1,000 open-ended) spanning eight disaster types. The benchmark is constructed via a human-LLM collaboration pipeline with stratified sampling to ensure balanced coverage. Models are evaluated under varying evidence conditions, from closed-book to noisy evidence integration, enabling separation of internal knowledge from reasoning under imperfect information. For open-ended QA, we propose a human-verified keypoint-based evaluation protocol emphasizing factual completeness over verbosity. Experiments with 20 models reveal substantial divergences from general-purpose leaderboards such as MMLU-Pro. While recent open-weight models approach proprietary systems in clean settings, performance degrades sharply under realistic noise, exposing critical reliability gaps for disaster response. All code, data, and evaluation resources are available at https://github.com/TamuChen18/DisastQA

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