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Agentic search has recently emerged as a powerful paradigm, where an agent interleaves multi-step reasoning with on-demand retrieval to solve complex questions. Despite its success, how to design a retriever for agentic search remains largely underexplored. Existing search agents typically rely on similarity-based retrievers, while similar passages are not always useful for final answer generation. In this paper, we propose a novel retriever training framework tailored for agentic search. Unlike retrievers designed for single-turn retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) that only rely on local passage utility, we propose to use both local query-passage relevance and global answer correctness to measure passage utility in a multi-turn agentic search. We further introduce an iterative training strategy, where the search agent and the retriever are optimized bidirectionally and iteratively. Different from RAG retrievers that are only trained once with fixed questions, our retriever is continuously improved using evolving and higher-quality queries from the agent. Extensive experiments on seven single-hop and multi-hop QA benchmarks demonstrate that our retriever, termed Agentic-R, consistently outperforms strong baselines across different search agents.

ACL 2026

Agentic-R: Learning to Retrieve for Agentic Search

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>
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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.

technical paper

Lifelong knowledge editing aims to inject a stream of factual updates into large language models (LLMs) without retraining, yet existing memory-based editors often suffer from catastrophic forgetting as edits accumulate. We argue that a key factor is the coupled knowledge memory mechanism, where addressing (routing) and storage (writing via memory-module updates) are entangled. This entanglement makes it difficult to confine the effects of each edit to its intended scope, particularly in multi-domain and associated-fact editing streams, where updates either span diverse semantic domains or repeatedly modify related attributes of the same subject. Consequently, updating memory for one edit inadvertently alters the routing and stored representations of previously injected edits, leading to catastrophic forgetting as edits accumulate. We propose **DKME**, which decouples addressing from storage via two stages: decoupled semantic addressing learns a fact-aware manifold for scope-aware routing, and partitioned memory storage localizes edits to memory partitions identified by unsupervised clustering in the embedding space. Experiments on three benchmarks, including HalluEditBench, CKnowEdit, and WikiData$_\text{counterfact}$, demonstrate that DKME consistently achieves a more favorable trade-off between editing success and locality compared to baselines, while maintaining more stable performance as the edit scale increases.

DKME: Rethinking Coupled Knowledge Memory for Lifelong Model Editing of Large Language Models

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have spurred interest in neuro‑symbolic methods for logical reasoning based on auto‑formalization, where LLMs first formalize problems into symbolic programs, for solvers to perform reasoning over.
However, existing auto-formalization methods remain prone to both syntactic and semantic errors.
Specifically, the absence of a program‑level semantic verification mechanism leaves semantic errors largely unaddressed.
In this paper, we propose a novel approach to semantic error correction via program preference retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG).
First, we conduct an in-depth analysis of semantic error patterns, and then automatically synthesize \textbf{SemanticPref}, a program preference dataset to model these patterns. Using the dataset as the knowledge base, we introduce \textbf{PrefRAG}, a general RAG framework for refinement in auto-formalization, which enables LLMs to detect and repair syntactic and semantic errors\footnote{\url{https://github.com/sysulic/PrefRAG}}.
Extensive evaluations across both in-distribution (ID) benchmarks (i.e., AR-LSAT and FOLIO) and out‑of‑distribution (OOD) datasets show that PrefRAG consistently outperforms strong baselines, achieving an average accuracy improvement of 2.39\% on ID and 6.23\% on OOD datasets.

PrefRAG: Correcting Semantic Errors in Auto-Formalization for Logical Reasoning with Program Preference RAG

Recent speech foundation models excel at multilingual automatic speech recognition (ASR) for high-resource languages, but adapting them to low-resource languages remains challenging due to data scarcity and efficiency constraints. Full-model fine-tuning is computationally expensive and prone to overfitting, while parameter-efficient methods like LoRA apply adaptation uniformly across layers, overlooking internal representations thus compromising effectiveness and efficiency. We analyze multilingual ASR models and reveal a U-shaped adaptability pattern: early and late layers are language-specific and require more adaptation, while intermediate layers retain shared semantics and need less. Building on this observation, we propose DAMA, a Depth-Aware Model Adaptation framework that allocates adaptation capacity according to each layer’s role. DAMA also introduces Singular Value Decomposition (SVD)-based initialization to constrain adaptation and preserve the U-shaped pattern, as well as a frozen middle-layer basis for further efficiency. Evaluated on 18 low-resource languages across two benchmark datasets, DAMA matches or surpasses state-of-the-art accuracy with 80% fewer trainable parameters, achieves a 29% error reduction under extreme data scarcity, and significantly improves memory, training time, and computational efficiency over baselines. These results highlight the benefits of structure-aware adaptation for efficient, scalable multilingual ASR.

Adapting Where It Matters: Depth-Aware Adaptation for Efficient Multilingual Speech Recognition in Low-Resource Languages

Large language model (LLM) reinforcement learning (RL) pipelines are often bottlenecked by rollout generation, making end-to-end training slow. Recent work mitigates this by running rollouts with quantization to accelerate decoding, which is the most expensive stage of the RL loop. However, these setups destabilize optimization by amplifying the training–-inference gap: rollouts are operated at low precision, while learning updates are computed at full precision. To address this challenge, we propose QaRL (Rollout Alignment Quantization-Aware RL), which aligns training-side forward with the quantized rollout to minimize mismatch. We further identify a failure mode in quantized rollouts: long-form responses tend to produce repetitive, garbled tokens (error tokens). To mitigate these problems, we introduce TBPO (Trust-Band Policy Optimization), a sequence-level objective with dual clipping for negative samples, aimed to keep updates within the trust region. On Qwen3-30B-A3B MoE for math problems, QaRL outperforms quantized-rollout training by +5.5 while improving stability and preserving low-bit throughput benefits.

QaRL: Rollout-Aligned Quantization-Aware RL for Fast and Stable Training under Training--Inference Mismatch

The integration of large language models (LLMs) with external tools has significantly expanded the capabilities of AI agents. However, as the diversity of both LLMs and tools increases, selecting the optimal model-tool combination becomes a high-dimensional optimization challenge. Existing approaches often rely on a single model or fixed tool-calling logic, failing to exploit the performance variations across heterogeneous model-tool pairs. In this paper, we present **ATLAS** (**A**daptive **T**ool-**L**LM **A**lignment and **S**ynergistic Invocation), a dual-path framework for dynamic tool usage in cross-domain complex reasoning. **ATLAS** operates via a dual-path approach: (1) **training-free cluster-based routing** that exploits empirical priors for domain-specific alignment, and (2) **RL-based multi-step routing** that explores autonomous trajectories for out-of-distribution generalization. Extensive experiments across 15 benchmarks demonstrate that our method outperforms closed-source models like GPT-4o as well as existing routing methods on both in-distribution (+10.1%) and out-of-distribution (+13.1%) tasks. Furthermore, our framework shows significant gains in visual reasoning by orchestrating specialized multi-modal tools.

ATLAS: Orchestrating Heterogeneous Models and Tools for Multi-Domain Complex Reasoning

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) achieve remarkable performance by explicitly generating multi-step chains of thought, but this capability incurs substantial inference latency and computational cost. Collaborative inference offers a promising solution by selectively allocating work between lightweight and large models, yet a fundamental challenge remains: determining when a reasoning step requires the capacity of a large model or the efficiency of a small model. Existing routing strategies either rely on local token probabilities or post-hoc verification, introducing significant inference overhead. In this work, we propose a novel perspective on step-wise collaboration: the difficulty of a reasoning step can be inferred from its very first token. Inspired by the “Aha Moment” phenomenon in LRMs, we show that the entropy of the initial token serves as a strong predictor of step difficulty. Building on this insight, we introduce GlimpRouter, a training-free step-wise collaboration framework. GlimpRouter employs a lightweight model to generate only the first token of each reasoning step and routes the step to a larger model only when the initial token entropy exceeds a threshold. Experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that our approach significantly reduces inference latency while preserving accuracy. For instance, GlimpRouter attains a substantial 10.7% improvement in accuracy while reducing inference latency by 25.9% compared to a standalone large model on AIME25. These results suggest a simple yet effective mechanism for reasoning: allocating computation based on a glimpse of thought rather than full-step evaluation.

GlimpRouter: Efficient Collaborative Inference by Glimpsing One Token of Thoughts

With the remarkable performance of large language models (LLMs) in medicine, particularly their ability to support clinical decision-making in medical dialogues, a key limitation remains: the static reasoning patterns derived from human expert experience are often inadequate for the dynamic and diverse nature of real-world multi-turn conversations. While recent large reasoning models (such as R1) enable deeper and more complex thought processes to address such challenges, they also introduce significant redundancy. Meanwhile, recent studies on reusing atomic thoughts demonstrate a practical pathway toward dynamic and precise reasoning in general domains. In this paper, we investigate the role of atomic thought-based experience in medical dialogue tasks. First, we collect human expert clinical experience. Then, we propose a novel distillation framework that extracts atomic thoughts from teacher models and reuses them to guide reasoning and generate responses. Based on this framework, we construct training data from ReMeDi and fine-tune student models, which demonstrate enhanced performance in both static and interactive medical dialogue scenarios. Furthermore, we examine the impact of experience across various models, datasets, and scenarios. Crucially, transferring this experience empowers weaker models to generate high-quality reasoning data, matching the annotation capabilities of stronger LLMs while significantly reducing costs. The code is available in this repository https://github.com/VioletAmethystLunar/Atomic-Thoughts-Medical-Dialogue.

Experience is the Teacher: Reusing Atomic Thoughts from LLMs to Improve Medical Dialogue

Large language models (LLMs) remain vulnerable to multi-turn jailbreaking attacks that exploit conversational context to bypass safety constraints gradually. These attacks target different harm categories through distinct conversational approaches. Existing multi-turn methods often rely on heuristic or ad hoc exploration strategies, providing limited insight into underlying model weaknesses. The relationship between conversation patterns and model vulnerabilities across harm categories remains poorly understood. We propose Pattern Enhanced Chain of Attack (PE-CoA), a framework of five conversation patterns to construct multi-turn jailbreaks through natural dialogue. Evaluating PE-CoA on twelve LLMs spanning ten harm categories, we achieve state-of-the-art performance, uncovering pattern-specific vulnerabilities and LLM behavioral characteristics: models exhibit distinct weakness profiles, defense to one pattern does not generalize to others, and model families share similar failure modes. These findings highlight limitations of safety training and indicate the need for pattern-aware defenses. Code available on: https://github.com/Ragib-Amin-Nihal/PE-CoA

Pattern Enhanced Multi-Turn Jailbreaking: Exploiting Structural Vulnerabilities in Large Language Models

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable performance in Visually Rich Document Understanding (VRDU) tasks, but their capabilities are mainly evaluated on pristine, well-structured document images. We consider document reconstruction from shredded fragments, a challenging VRDU setting that requires integrating visual pattern recognition with semantic reasoning under significant content discontinuities. To facilitate systematic evaluation of complex VRDU tasks, we introduce ShredBench, a benchmark supported by an automated generation pipeline that renders fragmented documents directly from Markdown. The proposed pipeline ensures evaluation validity by allowing the flexible integration of latest or unseen textual sources to prevent training data contamination. ShredBench assesses four scenarios (English, Chinese, Code, Table) with three fragmentation granularities (8, 12, 16 pieces). Empirical evaluations on state-of-the-art MLLMs reveal a significant performance gap: The method is effective on intact documents; however, once the document is shredded, restoration becomes a significant challenge, with NED dropping sharply as fragmentation increases. Our findings highlight that current MLLMs lack the fine-grained cross-modal reasoning required to bridge visual discontinuities, identifying a critical gap in robust VRDU research.

ShredBench: Evaluating the Semantic Reasoning Capabilities of Multimodal LLMs in Document Reconstruction

Aligning LLMs in low-resource multilingual settings faces a fundamental reward bottleneck: scalar rewards lack cultural generalization, while unstructured critiques remain noisy and unverifiable. To bridge this gap, we introduce a Structured Multilingual Reward Modeling Framework that extends Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) to subjective and open-ended tasks. The framework unifies three core components to transform abstract quality into concrete supervision: (1) a Structured Checklist Schema decomposing evaluation into granular universal reasoning steps and task-specific criteria; (2) Structured Generative Critique Modeling, which produces rubric-aligned critiques with grounded justifications; and (3) Adaptive Multilingual Reward Optimization, integrating reasoning quality and language consistency into a verifiable objective. We integrate this framework into a bootstrapped Group Relative Policy Optimization pipeline, augmented by length-aware normalization and variance stabilization to ensure stability. Extensive experiments on a newly constructed suite covering 7 subjective task categories across 50 low-resource languages demonstrate that this checklist-driven approach yields substantial improvements in reasoning capability and response quality, particularly in settings where traditional reward models exhibit significant degradation. We publicly release our models and the corresponding evaluation benchmark to facilitate further research. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/Shajiu/SGCM}.

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DKME: Rethinking Coupled Knowledge Memory for Lifelong Model Editing of Large Language Models

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