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Autonomous agents powered by large language models (LLM-based agents) are capable of using off-the-shelf tools to interact with the environment, solve real-world problems, and boost work efficiency. However, current approaches to enhancing tool use for LLM-based agents primarily focus on post-training fine-tuning or test-time context extension. These methods overlook the fundamental tool knowledge acquisition during the early training phase, where models actually learn and internalize core knowledge representations, restricting model performance on out-of-distribution tool usage. To solve such a problem, we introduce enhancing \textbf{tool} knowledge for LLM-based agents during \textbf{c}ontinuous \textbf{p}re-\textbf{t}raining (\textbf{ToolCPT}). We identify and bridge a key gap in current LLM training by shifting focus from tool-calling patterns to deep internalization of core tool-knowledge representations. We begin by curating 5.1 million code artifacts from large-scale, high-quality code repositories. These artifacts are selected based on a set of criteria that defines a usable &quot;proxy agent tool&quot;, thereby forming a comprehensive agent tool library. For each proxy tool, we then create a detailed playbook covering implementation specifications, core functionalities, interaction protocols with other tools, and illustrative positive and negative examples. This process yields a large-scale tool knowledge corpus comprising 18 billion tokens, which is used to continuously pre-train our model. Experiments show our playbook-enhanced corpus catalyzes deep knowledge internalization, driving the model to notable performance gains on multiple standard benchmarks.

ACL 2026

ToolCPT: Improving Tool Utilization in LLM Agents via Continuous Pre-training

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EMNLP 2024

EMNLP 2024 will take place in Miami, Florida from Nov 12th to Nov 16th, 2024, at the Hyatt Regency Miami Hote and on Underline for remote participants.

Autonomous agents powered by large language models (LLM-based agents) are capable of using off-the-shelf tools to interact with the environment, solve real-world problems, and boost work efficiency. However, current approaches to enhancing tool use for LLM-based agents primarily focus on post-training fine-tuning or test-time context extension. These methods overlook the fundamental tool knowledge acquisition during the early training phase, where models actually learn and internalize core knowledge representations, restricting model performance on out-of-distribution tool usage. To solve such a problem, we introduce enhancing \textbf{tool} knowledge for LLM-based agents during \textbf{c}ontinuous \textbf{p}re-\textbf{t}raining (\textbf{ToolCPT}). We identify and bridge a key gap in current LLM training by shifting focus from tool-calling patterns to deep internalization of core tool-knowledge representations. We begin by curating 5.1 million code artifacts from large-scale, high-quality code repositories. These artifacts are selected based on a set of criteria that defines a usable "proxy agent tool", thereby forming a comprehensive agent tool library. For each proxy tool, we then create a detailed playbook covering implementation specifications, core functionalities, interaction protocols with other tools, and illustrative positive and negative examples. This process yields a large-scale tool knowledge corpus comprising 18 billion tokens, which is used to continuously pre-train our model. Experiments show our playbook-enhanced corpus catalyzes deep knowledge internalization, driving the model to notable performance gains on multiple standard benchmarks.

technical paper

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.

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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.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) effectively improves the accuracy of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, retrieval noises significantly undermine the quality of LLMs' generation, necessitating the development of denoising mechanisms. Previous works extract evidence straightforwardly without deep thinking, which may risk filtering out key clues and struggle with generalization. To this end, we propose EviOmni, which learns to extract rational evidence via reasoning first and then extracting. Specifically, EviOmni integrates evidence reasoning and evidence extraction into one unified trajectory, followed by knowledge token masking to avoid information leakage, optimized via on-policy reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards in terms of answer, length, and format. Extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets show the superiority of EviOmni, which provides compact and high-quality evidence, enhances the accuracy of downstream tasks, and supports both traditional and agentic RAG systems.

Learning to Extract Rational Evidence via Reinforcement Learning for Retrieval-Augmented Generation

The initial outpatient consultation is critical for clinical decision-making, yet it is often conducted by a single physician under time pressure, making it prone to cognitive biases and incomplete evidence capture. Although the Multi-Disciplinary Team (MDT) reduces these risks, they are costly and difficult to scale to real-time intake. We propose Aegle, a synchronous virtual MDT framework that brings MDT-level reasoning to outpatient consultations via a graph-based multi-agent architecture. Aegle formalizes the consultation state using a structured SOAP representation, separating evidence collection from diagnostic reasoning to improve traceability and bias control. An orchestrator dynamically activates specialist agents, which perform decoupled parallel reasoning and are subsequently integrated by an aggregator into a coherent clinical note. Experiments on ClinicalBench and a real-world RAPID-IPN dataset across 24 departments and 53 metrics show that Aegle consistently outperforms state-of-the-art proprietary and open-source models in documentation quality and consultation capability.

Beyond the Individual: Virtualizing Multi-Disciplinary Reasoning for Clinical Intake via Collaborative Agents

Speculative decoding (SD) accelerates large language model inference by allowing a lightweight draft model to propose outputs that a stronger target model verifies. However, its token-centric nature allows erroneous steps to propagate. Prior approaches mitigate this using external reward models, but incur additional latency, computational overhead, and limit generalizability. We propose SpecGuard, a verification-aware speculative decoding framework that performs step-level verification using only model-internal signals. At each step, SpecGuard samples multiple draft candidates and selects the most consistent step, which is then validated using an ensemble of two lightweight model-internal signals: (i) an attention-based grounding score that measures attribution to the input and previously accepted steps, and (ii) a log-probability-based score that captures token-level confidence. These signals jointly determine whether a step is accepted or recomputed using the target, allocating compute selectively. Experiments across a range of reasoning benchmarks show that SpecGuard improves accuracy by 3.6% while reducing latency by ~11%, outperforming both SD and reward-guided SD.

From Tokens to Steps: Verification-Aware Speculative Decoding for Efficient Multi-Step Reasoning

The rise of Human-AI collaboration can effectively speed up the research process for experts and allow anyone with critical thinking skills to conduct innovative work. A key part of this collaboration is the AI's ability to improve a paper with human feedback—updating both the text and experiments to meet high standards. To evaluate this skill, we introduce ReviseBench, an extensible benchmark built on real academic data that can be easily scaled via agent-driven automated data collection. It tests the skills of Large Language Models (LLMs) on paper interpretation, experimental implementation, and paper formulation, using authors' camera-ready versions as natural human baselines. To facilitate a fine-grained assessment, we further propose ReviseArena, a platform supporting pair-wise comparisons between different AI-revised papers. Our initial evaluation results on ReviseBench reveal that even state-of-the-art foundation LLMs struggle significantly in this domain, achieving a win rate of less than 10\% against human experts, and facing issues like incremental revision, unprofessional revision, and potential data fabrication. Our code and data are released publicly at: https://github.com/CGCL-codes/ReviseBench.

Can AI Revise Research Papers with Human Review Feedback? An Empirical Study and Benchmark

Exploratory GUI testing is essential for software quality but suffers from high manual costs. While Multi-modal Large Language Model (MLLM) agents excel in navigation, they fail to autonomously discover defects due to two core challenges: Goal-Oriented Masking, where agents prioritize task completion over reporting anomalies, and Execution-Bias Attribution, where system defects are misidentified as agent errors. To address these, we first introduce GUITestBench, the first interactive benchmark for this task, featuring 143 tasks across 26 defects. We then propose GUITester, a multi-agent framework that decouples navigation from verification via two modules: (i) a Planning-Execution Module (PEM) that proactively probes for defects via embedded testing intents, and (ii) a Hierarchical Reflection Module (HRM) that resolves attribution ambiguity through interaction history analysis. GUITester achieves an F1-score of 48.90% (Pass@3) on GUITestBench, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines (33.35%). Our work demonstrates the feasibility of autonomous exploratory testing and provides a robust foundation for future GUI quality assurance.

GUITester: Enabling GUI Agents for Exploratory Defect Discovery

Failures are inevitable when embodied agents execute complex tasks. Visual-language models (VLMs) serve as the core component of embodied agents in perceiving the environment and making decisions. Assessing the capabilities of VLMs in detecting and reasoning about failures has become increasingly important. Previous work primarily considered low-level manipulation failures (e.g., 3cm grasp offsets), neglecting high-level failures arising during long-horizon task execution (e.g., object-dropping failure in the ``clean room'' task) by embodied agents. In this paper, we propose FAER, a failure-aware benchmark aiming to evaluate the performance of VLMs in terms of failure detection, failure categorization, failure description, and failure correction in long-horizon tasks. FAER comprises 3,323 episodes, spanning 3 scenes, 65 tasks, and 83 objects. We assess the performance of 16 widely utilized VLMs and 4 LLMs for FAER tasks. Experimental results show that nearly all VLMs, even GPT-4o, exhibit limited performance in failure detection with a high false negative rate, meaning that they tend to ignore abnormal events, revealing notable gaps in current models' capacity to effectively handle failures.

FAER: Benchmarking VLMs for Failure-Aware Embodied Reasoning

Detecting toxic content using language models is crucial yet challenging. While substantial progress has been made in English, toxicity detection in French remains underdeveloped, primarily due to the lack of culturally relevant, human-annotated, large-scale datasets. In this work, we release TOXIFRENCH, a dataset of 53,622 French online comments, together with a 1,388-sample balanced benchmark split for systematic evaluation. The dataset is constructed via a semi-automated annotation pipeline that reduces manual labeling to only 10% through high-confidence LLM-based pre-annotation and human verification, while ensuring statistically near-perfect alignment with human-only annotation. We then benchmark a broad range of models and uncover a counterintuitive insight: Small Language Models (SLMs) often surpass larger models in robustness and generalization on this task. Motivated by this finding, we propose a novel Chain-of-Thought (CoT) fine-tuning strategy using a dynamic weighted loss that progressively emphasizes the model's final decision, significantly improving faithfulness. Our fine-tuned 4B model (Qwen3-4B) achieves state-of-the-art performance on the benchmark, improving its balanced accuracy by 10% over its baseline and achieving better performance than GPT-4o and DeepSeek-R1 on our benchmark, while successfully retaining cross-lingual capabilities.

TOXIFRENCH: Benchmarking and Enhancing Language Models via CoT Fine-Tuning for French Toxicity Detection

AI coding has emerged as a core application of large language models (LLMs), evolving from single-file coding tasks towards complex software engineering (SWE) scenarios. Recent advances in agents have enabled multi-file, multi-language, and dependency-aware AI coding, significantly expanding the scope of AI-assisted software development. While a variety of benchmarks have been proposed to evaluate coding capabilities in general-purpose or GPU coding ecosystems such as CUDA and ROCm, systematic evaluation for Huawei Ascend CANN remains largely underexplored. In this work, we propose LiveCANNBench, an SWE-level benchmark designed for AI coding in the CANN software stack. LiveCANNBench is constructed from real-world CANN repositories and consists of over 400 task instances spanning multi-file, multi-language, and execution-aware coding challenges. Unlike existing static benchmarks that primarily focus on kernel-level code generation, LiveCANNBench adopts a live benchmarking paradigm, effectively mitigating data leakage and enabling more reliable evaluation of modern coding agents.

LiveCANNBench: Benchmark SWE AI Coding for Ascend CANN

Distributed LLM inference avoids sending raw inputs by transmitting intermediate hidden states, a practice widely assumed to preserve privacy. We challenge this assumption and demonstrate that intermediate representations alone are sufficient to leak sensitive user attributes. This setting poses a fundamental obstacle for existing attribute inference attacks, which typically rely on auxiliary embedding-attribute pairs. To characterize this previously underexplored privacy risk, we reformulate attribute inference as zero-shot matching over candidate attributes directly in the intermediate representation space, and introduce a purely intermediate-representation-based attribute inference attack, termed IR-AIA. To address two structural challenges that hinder attribute inference from intermediate representations, we propose SG-APCR to address layer-dependent anisotropy in intermediate embeddings and a sliding-window similarity matching strategy to handle subword-level semantic fragmentation. Experiments across three LLMs and three real-world datasets show that sensitive attributes can be reliably inferred using only intermediate representations, achieving Top-1 accuracy of up to 0.997 on CMS, 0.980 on Skytrax, and 0.986 on ECHR. These results reveal that intermediate states commonly considered safe to share can expose sensitive personal attributes on their own.

Privacy Risks of Intermediate Representations: Attribute Inference in Distributed LLM Inference

Human Label Variation (HLV) refers to legitimate disagreement in annotation that reflects the diversity of human perspectives rather than mere error. Long treated in NLP as $\textit{noise}$ to be eliminated, HLV has only recently been reframed as a $\textit{signal}$ for improving model robustness. With the rise of large language models (LLMs) and post-training methods such as human feedback-based alignment, the role of HLV has become increasingly consequential. Yet current preference-learning datasets routinely collapse multiple annotations into a single label, flattening diverse perspectives into artificial consensus. Preserving HLV is necessary not only for pluralistic alignment but also for sociotechnical safety evaluation, where model behavior must be assessed in relation to human interaction and societal context.
This position paper argues that preserving HLV as an embodiment of human pluralism must be treated as a $\textit{Selbstzweck}$, an intrinsic value in itself. We analyze the limitations of existing preference datasets and propose actionable strategies for incorporating HLV into dataset construction to better preserve pluralistic human values.

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