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Reinforcement learning with verifiable reward (RLVR) has become a promising paradigm for post-training large language models (LLMs) to improve their reasoning capability. However, when the rollout accuracy is low on hard problems, the reward becomes sparse, limiting learning efficiency and causing exploration bottlenecks. Existing approaches either rely on teacher models for distillation or filter out difficult problems, which limits scalability or restricts reasoning improvement through exploration.

We propose EvoCoT, a self-evolving curriculum learning framework based on two-stage chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning optimization. EvoCoT constrains the exploration space by self-generating and verifying CoT trajectories, then gradually shortens CoT steps to expand the space in a controlled way. The framework enables LLMs to stably learn from initially unsolved hard problems under sparse rewards. We apply EvoCoT to multiple LLM families, including Qwen, DeepSeek, and Llama. Experiments show that EvoCoT enables LLMs to solve previously unsolved problems, improves reasoning capability without external CoT supervision, and is compatible with various RL fine-tuning methods. We release the source code to support future research.

ACL 2026

EvoCoT: Overcoming the Exploration Bottleneck in Reinforcement Learning for LLMs

## Welcome!
"I am excited to welcome you to this year’s edition of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing! Importantly, it marks the 30th edition of EMNLP. With over 8,000 submissions, more than 3,000 accepted papers, and thousands of attendees, we have come a long way from that first
workshop, which had 14 accepted papers. As the field looks ahead, Suzhou is the fitting location for celebrating this milestone: rooted in a long literary tradition, yet modern and forward-looking, and home to a large share of the NLP community." 

*Message from the General Chair, Dirk Hovy*

EMNLP 2025

Celebrate 30 Years of EMNLP! 
EMNLP 2025 will be held in Suzhou, China from November 5th to November 9th, 2025.

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. 
[Full Message from General Chair Philipp Koehn](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QiJFOmMjvDgsDo3i1XzlQnImxe3RU_Cy/view?usp=sharing) 
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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.

Reliable evaluation is essential for understanding large language model (LLM) performance, yet today's go-to metrics, namely token-overlap scores (e.g., ROUGE) and embedding-based measures (e.g., BERTScore), often misjudge semantic similarity of documents. Our study shows that both token-overlap metrics and embedding-based metrics routinely assign nearly identical scores to texts that directly contradict each other, thereby potentially masking fundamental errors. We introduce MATCHA, an automatic metric that jointly rewards semantic agreement with a reference and penalizes contradictions. MATCHA employs a dual-view perspective that measures (i) proximity to the gold text and (ii) distance from an adversarially generated counterfactual contradiction. In eight public benchmarks, MATCHA outperforms popular metrics, compared with human annotations on question-answering, image caption generation, natural language inference, summarization, and semantic textual similarity tasks. On the TruthfulQA dataset (i.e., a dataset without a training set, where no embedding-based metrics could locally train on), this improvement in terms of matching texts with a reference reaches 18.38\% over ROUGE-L and 20.82\% over BERTScore. Both quantitative comparison and qualitative human assessments confirm the efficacy and validity of MATCHA and uncover fundamental weaknesses in pre-existing metrics. Compared with 23 embedding models, including top state-of-the-art ones, used as a metric similar to BERTScore, MATCHA remains the most accurate in distinguishing correct from incorrect statements solely based on a reference. Our code and metric are publicly available (https://github.com/Siran-Li/MATCHA).

MATCHA: Matching Text via Contrastive Semantic Alignment

We present semantic-pragmatic specification and annotation (ellipsis, coreference, bridging and discourse relations, information structure, scope of negation) in the multi-layer, genre-diversified, 3+ million-token Prague Dependency Treebank – Consolidated 2. 0. While morphology and syntax work almost exclusively on sentence level, the semantic-pragmatic phenomena are often related to two or more neighbouring sentences and possibly to an extra-linguistic context. In the contribution, we describe these phenomena from both the linguistic perspective (form of expression, relation to syntax and morphology) and the cognitive perspective (relation to context, real world knowledge, as well as to the related processes such as thinking or reasoning) – classifying the possible relations between the semantic-pragmatic units into cognitively plausible, distinguishable, and human-understandable categories. We have applied our results to the corpus, by annotating it in its entirety. The resulting dataset is publicly and freely available, to serve for verification and further investigation of (not only) these phenomena.

Semantic-pragmatic Annotations in the Prague Dependency Treebank

Time series forecasting underpins critical decision-making across diverse domains. While large language models (LLMs) offer promising reasoning capabilities, existing LLM-based time series forecasting approaches either reduce them to numerical predictors that bypass their strengths, or allow direct forecast generation that destabilizes predictions in non-stationary settings. We introduce CTRL, a framework that decouples semantic reasoning from quantitative prediction. A frozen backbone generates base forecasts, while specialized LLM agents function as controllers that analyze backbone prediction errors through decomposed trend, seasonal, and irregular components, grounding reasoning in interpretable temporal structure. Each agent outputs compact control signals that a lightweight residual decoder translates into forecast corrections. CTRL incorporates label-free test-time adaptation that detects distribution shift from input statistics alone and readapts control signals with only 3--24 LLM calls via caching. CTRL is explicitly designed to improve robustness under non-stationary temporal dynamics and distribution shift, while remaining competitive on highly stationary time series where adaptive correction provides limited additional benefit.

CTRL: Control-Based Time Series Forecasting with LLM-Guided Residual Learning

While Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at generalized reasoning, standard retrieval-augmented approaches fail to address the disconnected nature of long-term agentic memory. To bridge this gap, we introduce Synapse (Synergistic Associative Processing & Semantic Encoding), a unified memory architecture that transcends static vector similarity. Drawing from cognitive science, Synapse models memory as a dynamic graph where relevance emerges from spreading activation rather than pre-computed links. By integrating lateral inhibition and temporal decay, the system dynamically highlights relevant sub-graphs while filtering interference. We implement a Triple Hybrid Retrieval strategy that fuses geometric embeddings with activation-based graph traversal. Extensive evaluations on the LoCoMo benchmark show that Synapse significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in complex temporal and multi-hop reasoning tasks, offering a robust solution to the "Contextual Tunneling" problem.

Synapse: Empowering LLM Agents with Episodic-Semantic Memory via Spreading Activation

Large reasoning models (LRMs) achieve strong performance on mathematical reasoning tasks, often attributed to their capability to generate explicit chain-of-thought (CoT) explanations. However, recent work shows that LRMs often arrive at the correct answer before completing these textual reasoning steps, indicating the presence of latent reasoning -- internal, non-verbal computation encoded in hidden states. While this phenomenon has been explored in English, its multilingual behavior remains largely unknown. In this paper, we conduct a systematic investigation of multilingual latent reasoning in LRMs across 11 languages. Using a truncation-based strategy, we examine how the correct answer emerges as the model is given only partial reasoning traces, allowing us to measure stepwise latent prediction formation. Our results reveal clear evidence of multilingual latent reasoning, though unevenly: strong in resource-rich languages, weaker in low-resource ones, and broadly less observable on harder benchmarks. To understand whether these differences reflect distinct internal mechanisms, we further perform representational analyses. Despite surface-level disparities, we find that the internal evolution of predictions is highly consistent across languages and broadly aligns with English -- a pattern suggesting an English-centered latent reasoning pathway.

 Large Reasoning Models Are (Not Yet) Multilingual Latent Reasoners

Large language models (LLMs) have evolved from pure text generators into interactive agents capable of invoking external tools. However, LLM agents still struggle with goal-oriented queries, which require decomposing high-level objectives into sequences of interdependent API calls with accurate planning and execution. Current approaches rely on zero-shot evaluation due to the absence of training data; while proprietary models such as GPT-4 exhibit strong reasoning capabilities, smaller open-source models remain ineffective at complex tool use. To address this limitation, we propose a novel training framework GOAT, that enables fine-tuning LLM agents without human annotation. GOAT automatically synthesizes goal-oriented API execution data from API documents using a novel call-first generation paradigm, that constructs training data based on executed API call sequences. Through extensive experiments, we show that GOAT-trained agents achieve state-of-the-art performance across multiple existing goal-oriented benchmarks. In addition, we introduce GOATBench, a new goal-oriented API execution benchmark, and demonstrate that agents trained with GOAT also excel in this setting. These results highlight GOAT as a practical path toward building robust open-source LLM agents capable of complex reasoning and tool use.

GOAT: A Training Framework for Goal-Oriented Agent with Tools

Prompt injection attacks are recognized as one of the primary risks faced by LLM-integrated applications in recent years. However, common evaluation frameworks remain insufficient, lacking comprehensiveness and real-world relevance. To bridge this gap, we revisit the common evaluation framework and conduct an extensive evaluation across eight different evaluation settings, including 37 real-world applications, 185 injected tasks, 21 attack instructions, and a total of 143,745 queries. The evaluation highlights several findings. For example, real-world applications are more vulnerable to prompt injection attacks compared to those used in research settings. While complex attack instructions are more sophisticated, they are less effective than simple attack instructions. We further conduct an assessment of both prompt-level and model-level defense mechanisms and highlight their limitations in real-world applications. By exploring more diverse scenarios across different dimensions, our framework provides a solid foundation for assessing vulnerabilities in LLM-integrated applications and evaluating the efficacy of defensive strategies.

Rethinking Assessments of Prompt Injection Attacks

Continued Pre-Training (CPT) enables Large Language Models (LLMs) to acquire second-language capabilities, yet the underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. In this work, we investigate how CPT adapts model representations across diverse language families and scripts, model sizes, and architectures. We find that second-language abilities emerge through a selective adaptation mechanism: task-solving capabilities are preserved in ``semantic hub'', while interface layers retarget to shifted token distributions. Layer-swapping experiments demonstrate that semantic understanding can be surgically transferred between base and CPT models with minimal loss (e.g., swapping 50% of model parameters reduces performance by only 0.3%). Furthermore, we establish that attention components route language adaptation: larger parameter changes than feedforward networks, correlate more strongly with language-specific neurons, and their surgical replacement substantially degrades performance. Overall, our work provides a mechanistic understanding of CPT, guiding future work on efficient strategies for language adaptation.

 Disentangling Continued Pre-Training: Attention-Driven Routing and Semantic Hub Preservation in Language Adaptation

Masked diffusion language models (MDLMs) enable efficient parallel decoding but are limited by a monotonic unmasking policy, where committed tokens cannot be revised. While remasking-based methods mitigate early errors, they mainly intervene during generation. In this work, we study post-hoc refinement of a completed draft and find that naive correction often fails because of contextual lock-in, a phenomenon in which local error patterns become self-reinforcing. To address this, we propose PURE (Post-hoc Unlocking and REfinement), a training-free inference algorithm for two-phase decoding. PURE profiles confidence dynamics during drafting to identify unstable regions via an instability score ($\Delta_i$), then unlocks them through deterministic window masking and stochastic leftward relaxation. On reasoning benchmarks, PURE substantially improves accuracy when applied to LLaDA-8B-Instruct, including a gain of +12.9 points over the baseline on GSM8K. These gains require only a small refinement budget, yielding a favorable compute-quality trade-off for discrete diffusion decoding.

 PURE: Post-hoc Unlocking and REfinement for Discrete Diffusion Decoding

Recent work has demonstrated the promise of orchestrating large language models (LLMs) within evolutionary and agentic optimization systems. However, the mechanisms driving these optimization gains remain poorly understood. In this work, we present a large-scale study of LLM-guided evolutionary search, collecting optimization trajectories for 15 LLMs across 8 tasks. Although zero-shot problem-solving ability correlates with final optimization outcomes, it explains only part of the variance: models with similar initial capability often induce dramatically different search trajectories and outcomes. By analyzing these trajectories, we find that strong LLM optimizers behave as local refiners, producing frequent incremental improvements while progressively localizing the search in semantic space. Conversely, weaker optimizers exhibit large semantic drift, with sporadic breakthroughs followed by stagnation. Notably, various measures of solution novelty do not predict final performance; novelty is beneficial only when the search remains sufficiently localized around high-performing regions of the solution space. Our results highlight the importance of trajectory analysis for understanding and improving LLM-based optimization systems and provide actionable insights for their design and training.

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MATCHA: Matching Text via Contrastive Semantic Alignment

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