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LLM-as-a-Judge, which uses LLMs to evaluate responses to open-ended questions, has seen significant growth in recent years. It has been adopted as a scalable alternative to manual human evaluation, such as crowdsourcing, which is often time-consuming and costly. However, the discrepancy between LLM-generated evaluations and human evaluations remains a critical problem in this field. To bridge this gap, we propose Multi-Aspect Panels of LLM Evaluators (MAPLE), a framework that orchestrates evaluations across multiple criteria using multiple LLMs. MAPLE integrates criterion-wise pairwise evaluations from multiple LLMs by estimating the importance of criteria and the reliability of individual evaluators. We conduct experiments with both open-source and closed-source models. Our results demonstrate that MAPLE achieves superior alignment with human evaluations compared to baselines, highlighting the importance of employing multi-agent and multi-criteria evaluation strategies.

ACL 2026

 MAPLE: Multi-Aspect Panels of LLM Evaluators for Open-Ended Questions

### Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

Message from the General Chair: 
*It is my great pleasure and honor to welcome you to the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025), held in beautiful Vienna, Austria, from July 27 to August 1, 2025. ACL2025continues our field’s 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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ACL 2025

Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

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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.

Multilingual Retrieval-Augmented Generation (mRAG) systems often exhibit a perceived preference for high-resource languages, particularly English, resulting in the widespread adoption of English pivoting. While prior studies attribute this advantage to the superior English-centric capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), we find that such measurements are significantly distorted by structural priors inherent in evaluation benchmarks. Specifically, we identify exposure bias and a gold availability prior—both driven by the disproportionate concentration of resources in English—as well as cultural priors rooted in topic locality, as factors that hinder accurate assessment of genuine language preference. To address these biases, we propose DeLP (Debiased Language Preference), a calibrated metric designed to explicitly factor out these structural confounds. Our analysis using DeLP reveals that the previously reported English preference is largely a byproduct of evidence distribution rather than an inherent model bias. Instead, we find that retrievers fundamentally favor monolingual alignment between the query and the document language. Building on this insight, we introduce DELTA (DEbiased Language preference–guided Text Augmentation), a lightweight and efficient mRAG framework that strategically leverages monolingual alignment to optimize cross-lingual retrieval and generation. Experimental results demonstrate that DELTA consistently outperforms English pivoting and mRAG baselines across diverse languages.

Enhancing Multilingual RAG Systems with Debiased Language Preference-Guided Query Fusion

We introduce ***VLURes***, a multilingual benchmark for evaluating Vision-Language Models (VLMs) under *long-text grounding*: selecting and reasoning over the image-relevant subset of article-length text that contains distractors and ungrounded claims. *VLURes* contains **4,000** web-curated *image + long-text* pairs across **English (En), Japanese (Ja), Swahili (Sw), and Urdu (Ur)** and **10** topical categories, and defines **eight** tasks spanning image-only perception (OR, SU, RU, SS, IC) and image+text grounding (ITM, *Unrelatedness*, VQA). To construct web-realistic pairs, we apply language-adapted CLIP alignment to select representative images and filter weakly grounded pages. Across **10** proprietary and open VLMs evaluated under zero-shot and one-shot prompting, with and without rationales, the best model (GPT-4o) reaches **90.8%** overall accuracy but remains **6.7** points below human performance (**97.5%**) on Object Recognition, and cross-lingual sensitivity persists, while open models are substantially weaker and often lack reliable multilingual VL support. *VLURes* provides a practical testbed for long-text grounding and multilingual robustness in web-realistic agent settings.

 VLURes: Benchmarking Long-Text Grounding and Cross-Lingual Robustness in Vision Language Models

Despite the rapid progress of Vision-Language Models (VLMs), the field lacks benchmarks that rigorously diagnose their true reasoning abilities and chart meaningful progress toward human-like multimodal intelligence. Most existing evaluations focus on piecemeal or disconnected tasks, obscuring critical cognitive weaknesses and providing little insight for targeted improvement.
To address this gap, we introduce \textbf{BloomBench}, part of the \textit{Almieyar} benchmarking series, the first cognitively human-grounded, bilingual (English–Arabic) multimodal benchmark for VLMs. Grounded in Bloom’s Taxonomy, BloomBench systematically evaluates six levels of cognition (Remember, Understand, Apply, Analyze, Evaluate, Create) through carefully designed image–question–answer tasks. Built with a semi-automated pipeline and validated through a stratified hybrid quality assurance protocol, it ensures scalability, cultural inclusivity, and linguistic fidelity. 
Leveraging this framework, we conduct a comprehensive study of state-of-the-art VLMs to diagnose their cognitive profiles. 
Our analysis reveals a sharp cognitive asymmetry: while state-of-the-art models achieve strong performance ceilings in semantic understanding, they struggle substantially with factual recall and creative synthesis. This demonstrates that current general multimodal proficiency masks deeper limitations in specific cognitive layers.
Furthermore, our study highlights a critical performance gap between Arabic and English, exposing limitations in current cross-lingual multimodal reasoning. These findings establish a foundation for developing more cognitively aligned and inclusive VLMs.
The benchmark framework and dataset is available at: \url{https://github.com/qcri/Almieyar-Oryx-BloomBench}.

 Almieyar-Oryx-BloomBench: A Bilingual Multimodal Benchmark for Cognitively Informed Evaluation of Vision-Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in reasoning and tool use. However, the fundamental cognitive faculties essential for problem-solving—perception, reasoning, and memory—remain the stable core of intelligence. Unlike memorizing specific patterns, humans succeed in novel environments by applying these intrinsic faculties to adapt and optimize. Yet, whether LLMs possess this essential capacity—namely, the ability to continuously refine solutions in response to dynamic environmental feedback—remains underexplored. To address this challenge, we introduce \textbf{OPT-BENCH}, a benchmark for evaluating self-improvement capabilities in large-scale search spaces. By combining 20 machine learning tasks with 10 classic NP-hard problems, OPT-BENCH provides a rigorous setting to assess whether agents can adapt through intrinsic self-reflection rather than rote tool application. We further propose \textbf{OPT-Agent}, a framework that emulates human-like cognitive adaptation. It operates via a general perception--memory--reasoning loop, iteratively refining solutions based on environmental feedback. Through extensive experiments on 19 LLMs from 7 model families, including reasoning models, general models, and open-source models ranging from 3B to 235B parameters, we demonstrate stronger models are more effective at leveraging feedback signals for self-improvement. However, this upper-bound adaptability remains fundamentally constrained by the models' base capacity, and even the most advanced LLMs still fall short of human expert performance.

OPT-BENCH: Evaluating the Iterative Self-Optimization of LLM Agents in Large-Scale Search Spaces

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in agentic collaborative problem-solving, albeit a gap exists. Existing frameworks predominantly rely on natural language as a primary representation (format) for agentic communication. However natural language could be ambiguous and verbose. Furthermore, recent works have shown that alternative representations can enhance performance in LLMs on certain tasks. But current approaches lack the intelligence necessary to understand, learn or apply optimal communication representations adaptively. In this paper, we propose to dynamically learn the optimal message representations to enhance agentic performance. We model the optimization problem as an Expanding Markov Decision Process (EMDP) and propose our method named OPTiMACS. We evaluate our system across benchmark datasets of collaborative problem-solving. The results show significant performance improvements while maintaining efficiency. Our work bridges the gap between rigid communication protocols and open-ended natural language by providing an adaptive framework that learns task-aware structural representations.

Learning Optimal Message Representations for Agentic Communication

Peer review is an essential process in scientific research, yet the growing workload has made its automation increasingly necessary. In this study, we analyze how different types of reviewer guidelines, such as official conference guidelines and reviewer-imitating ones distilled from high-quality human reviews, affect automated peer review. Our experiments show that official conference guidelines produce review results most consistent with human judgments, suggesting that evaluation criteria refined through conference practice serve as effective guidance for automated reviewing as well. In contrast, reviewer-imitating guidelines, especially those enforcing strict rubric-style scoring, consistently degraded automated review performance, highlighting the importance of allowing subjective and holistic scoring.

 Evaluating the Impact of Reviewer Guideline Design on LLM-Based Automated Peer Review

Although Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) revolutionized parameter-efficient fine-tuning, it often incurs an inference overhead due to the extra computation required by adapter layers. While most literature focuses on maximizing accuracy or minimizing parameter counts, this paper prioritizes single-request inference performance in the unmerged adapter setting, where adapters must remain decoupled from the base model at runtime. By analyzing LoRA adapters on GPUs, we identify segmented function calls as the primary source of this latency. To address this, we propose \textbf{G}rouped \textbf{A}daptive \textbf{W}eight \textbf{S}haring (GAWS), a novel adapter design based on \emph{structured Kronecker product decomposition}. Experiments on T5-3B, GPT-2 Large, LLaMA3.2-3B, and RoBERTa-Large show that GAWS reduces latency to about 40\% of the gap between the unmerged LoRA and the base model, while maintaining parameter efficiency and comparable accuracy. This positions GAWS as a Pareto-efficient solution for deploying adapted LLMs in latency-sensitive settings, balancing the high latency of compressed adapters with the accuracy of LoRA. The source code is available at:
https://github.com/SamsungLabs/GAWS .

Grouped Adaptive Weight Sharing (GAWS): An Inference-Efficient Adaptation Method for Large Language Models

Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods, especially LoRA, are widely used for adapting pre-trained models to downstream tasks due to their computational and storage efficiency. However, in the context of LoRA and its variants, the potential of activation subspaces corresponding to tail eigenvectors remains substantially under-exploited, which may lead to suboptimal fine-tuning performance. In this work, we propose Astra (Activation-Space Tail-Eigenvector Low-Rank Adaptation), a novel PEFT method that leverages the tail eigenvectors of the model output activations—estimated from a small task-specific calibration set—to construct task-adaptive low-rank adapters. By constraining updates to the subspace spanned by these tail eigenvectors, Astra achieves faster convergence and improved downstream performance with a significantly reduced parameter budget. Extensive experiments across natural language understanding (NLU) and natural language generation (NLG) tasks demonstrate that Astra consistently outperforms existing PEFT baselines across 16 benchmarks and even surpasses full fine-tuning (FFT) in certain scenarios.

 Astra: Activation-Space Tail-Eigenvector Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models

Financial decision-making in multilingual settings demands accurate numerical reasoning grounded in diverse modalities, yet existing benchmarks largely overlook this high-stakes, real-world challenge, especially for Indic languages. We introduce FinVQA, a benchmark for evaluating financial numerical and multimodal reasoning in multilingual Indic contexts. FinVQA spans English, Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati, and Tamil, and comprises 18,900 samples across 14 financial domains. The dataset captures diverse reasoning paradigms under realistic constraints, and is structured across three difficulty levels (easy, moderate, hard) and four question formats: multiple choice, fill-in-the-blank, table matching, and true/false. To address these challenges, we propose FIND, a framework that combines supervised fine-tuning with constraint-aware decoding to promote faithful numerical reasoning, robust multimodal grounding, and structured decision-making. Together, FinVQA and FIND establish a rigorous evaluation and modeling paradigm for high-stakes multilingual multimodal financial reasoning.

 FIND: Toward Multimodal Financial Reasoning and Question Answering for Indic Languages

Current guardian models are predominantly Western-centric and optimized for high-resource languages, leaving low-resource African languages vulnerable to evolving harms, cross-lingual failures, and cultural misalignment. Moreover, most guardian models rely on rigid, predefined safety categories that fail to generalize across diverse linguistic and sociocultural contexts. Achieving robust safety requires flexible, runtime-enforceable policies and benchmarks that reflect local norms, harm scenarios, and cultural expectations. We introduce UbuntuGuard, the first policy-based safety benchmark for African languages built from adversarial queries authored by 155 domain experts across sensitive fields, including healthcare. From these expert-crafted queries, we derive context-specific safety policies and reference responses that capture culturally grounded risk signals, enabling policy-aligned evaluation of guardian models. We evaluate 15 models, comprising seven general-purpose LLMs and eight guardian models across three distinct variants: static, dynamic, and multilingual. Our findings reveal that existing English-centric benchmarks overestimate real-world multilingual safety, cross-lingual transfer provides partial but insufficient coverage, and dynamic models, while better equipped to leverage policies at inference time, still struggle to fully localize African-language contexts. These findings highlight the urgent need for multilingual, culturally grounded safety benchmarks to enable the development of reliable and equitable guardian models for low-resource languages.

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