United States

Large language models are increasingly used in inventive problem-solving, but effective support requires more than open-ended idea generation. Inventive problem-solving requires improving one aspect of a technical system without unintentionally worsening another. TRIZ (Theory of Inventive Problem Solving) provides a unique and structured framework for this setting by representing engineering trade-offs as contradictions and linking them to standardized inventive principles. However, prior TRIZ--LLM evaluations are typically small-scale, case studies in focused areas of technology, and rarely grounded in patent text, which makes it difficult to assess structured reasoning at scale. We introduce TRIZBench, a dataset and benchmark for TRIZ reasoning grounded in open technical sources and U.S.\ patents. TRIZBench evaluates the core TRIZ workflow through three tasks: contradiction prediction, inventive principle prediction, and grounded TRIZ reasoning. Experiments with multiple LLM baselines show that detecting contradictions is easier than recovering correct trade-off pairs, while principle prediction benefits from explicitly exploiting TRIZ structure. Our findings further underscore the importance of grounding. We show that semantic retrieval enables evidence-based justifications and helps explain why LLMs fail. Dataset and code are available at https://github.com/ellenzhuwang/trizbench.

ACL 2026

 Inventive Problem Solving with LLMs: A Benchmark for TRIZ Reasoning

**Welcome to EMNLP 2023!**

On behalf of the EMNLP 2023 Organizing Committee, I extend a warm and heartfelt welcome to all of you to the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). It is with immense pleasure and excitement that we gather here in Singapore, a vibrant hub of innovation and technological advancement.

The conference program is packed with insightful presentations, thought-provoking workshops, and engaging networking opportunities. In addition to the technical sessions, we have also planned several social events that will provide you with the opportunity to connect with your colleagues.

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EMNLP 2023

EMNLP 2023 took place in Singapore from Dec 6th to Dec 10th, 2023.

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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.

This paper proposes a novel in-context learning approach to support low resource machine translation for the Coptic language, using prompts based on Universal Dependencies parses of input sentences. Building on existing work using bilingual dictionaries to support inference for vocabulary items, we add several representations of syntactic analyses to our inputs, specifically exploring the inclusion of raw parser outputs, verbalizations of parses in plain English, and explanations of specific difficult constructions identified in input subgraphs and how they can be translated. Our results show that while syntactic information alone is not as useful as dictionary-based glosses, combining retrieved dictionary items with syntactic information achieves significant gains across model sizes, achieving new state-of-the-art results for the language.

Syntax as a Rosetta Stone: Universal Dependencies for In-Context Coptic Translation

Recent action recognition based on vision--language pretraining and self-supervised video foundation models tends to induce spurious correlations and shortcut learning by relying on action-irrelevant cues, such as backgrounds and object co-occurrences. By contrast, object-detection-based approaches can suppress spurious correlations; however, the loss of input information can limit accuracy. To mitigate this trade-off, we combine these two approaches to learn complementary features that compensate for each other's shortcomings. Specifically, we leverage the commonsense knowledge of large language models (LLMs) regarding human actions and realize a framework in which an LLM agent integrates the two approaches within an agentic learning paradigm to design motion features tailored to the target actions. The LLM agent uses an open vocabulary object detector to instruct the video foundation model with the target and nontarget objects in the video to make the model attend to objects in a video required for recognizing the target actions. The composition of the detected objects is optimized for the target actions through in-context reinforcement learning (ICRL) using the commonsense knowledge of the LLM. Experiments on multiple public action recognition datasets and an ablation study confirm the robustness of features learned using the proposed method and the effectiveness of ICRL.

A2O: LLM-based Agentic Learning of Action-to-Object Features for Video Action Recognition

Standardized math assessments require expensive human pilot studies to establish the difficulty of test items. We investigate the predictive value of open-source large language models (LLMs) for evaluating the difficulty of multiple-choice math questions for real-world students. We show that, while LLMs are poor direct judges of problem difficulty, simulation-based approaches with LLMs yield promising results under the right conditions. Under the proposed approach, we simulate a "classroom" of 4th, 8th, or 12th grade students by prompting the LLM to role-play students of varying proficiency levels. We use the outcomes of these simulations to fit Item Response Theory (IRT) models, comparing learned difficulty parameters for items to their real-world difficulties, as determined by item-level statistics furnished by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). We observe correlations as high as 0.75, 0.76, and 0.82 for grades 4, 8, and 12, respectively. In our simulations, we experiment with different "classroom sizes," showing tradeoffs between computation size and accuracy. We find that role-plays with named students improves predictions (compared to student ids), and stratifying names across gender and race further improves predictions. Our results show that LLMs with relatively weaker mathematical abilities (Gemma) actually yield better real-world difficulty predictions than mathematically stronger models (Llama and Qwen), further underscoring the suitability of open-source models for the task.

Take Out Your Calculators: Estimating the Real Difficulty of Question Items with LLM Student Simulations

Visually Grounded Document Question Answering often lacks robust, end-to-end solutions capable of handling complex, multi-answer queries without reliance on ad-hoc processing. In this work, we propose two turnkey LLM architectures to address this gap. We first introduce a single-head architecture where coordinates are represented as special tokens within the unified vocabulary. While structurally robust, this approach suffers from the limitations of discrete supervision; to address this, we propose a novel ``softening token'' method that enables differentiable Mean-Squared-Error loss over token probabilities. Although this significantly improves visual grounding, the spatial precision remains bound by discretization. Consequently, we propose a second solution: a dual-head architecture that alternates between text generation and regression-based bounding box prediction. This method offers high spatial precision via a regression head, further stabilized by our introduction of an Intersection-over-Union loss. Finally, by combining the single head model's structural robustness with the high precision of the dual head model, we propose an ensemble method that yields significant performance gains beyond each of individual components.

Switching Heads and Softening Tokens: Turnkey Solutions to Visually Grounded Document QA

Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly used to interact with and execute tasks in dynamic environments. However, a critical yet overlooked limitation of these agents is that they, by default, assume a stationary context, failing to account for the real-world time elapsed between messages. We refer to this as "temporal blindness". This limitation hinders decisions about when to invoke tools, leading agents to either over-rely on stale context and skip needed tool calls, or under-rely on it and redundantly repeat tool calls. To study this challenge, we constructed TicToc, a diverse dataset of multi-turn user–agent message trajectories across 76 scenarios, spanning dynamic environments with high, medium, and low time sensitivity. We collected human preferences between "calling a tool" and "directly answering" on each sample, and evaluated how well LLM tool-calling decisions align with human preferences under varying amounts of elapsed time. Our analysis reveals that existing models display poor alignment with human temporal perception, with no models achieving a normalized alignment rate better than 65% when given time stamp information. We also show that naive, prompt-based alignment techniques have limited effectiveness for most models, but specific post-training alignment can be a viable way to align multi-turn LLM tool use with human temporal perception. Our data and findings provide a first step toward understanding and mitigating temporal blindness, offering insights to foster the development of more time-aware and human-aligned agents.

Your LLM Agents are Temporally Blind: The Misalignment Between Tool Use Decisions and Human Time Perception

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are increasingly adopted as autonomous agents in interactive environments, yet their ability to proactively address safety hazards remains insufficient. We introduce SafetyALFRED, built upon the embodied agent benchmark ALFRED, augmented with six categories of real-world kitchen hazards. While existing safety evaluations focus on hazard recognition through disembodied question answering (QA) settings, we evaluate eleven state-of-the-art models from the Qwen, Gemma, and Gemini families on not only hazard recognition, but also active risk mitigation through embodied task planning. Our experimental results reveal a significant alignment gap: while models can accurately recognize hazards in QA settings, average mitigation success rates for these hazards are low in comparison. Our findings demonstrate that static evaluations through QA are insufficient for physical safety, advocating for a paradigm shift toward benchmarks that prioritize multi-step corrective actions in embodied context.

SafetyALFRED: Evaluating Safety-Conscious Planning of Vision Language Models

AI-driven automated scoring systems offer scalable and efficient means of evaluating complex student-generated responses. Yet, despite increasing demand for transparency and interpretability, the field has yet to develop a widely accepted solution for interpretable automated scoring to be used in large-scale real-world assessments. This work takes a principled approach to address this challenge. We analyze the needs and potential benefits of interpretable automated scoring for various assessment stakeholder groups and develop four principles of interpretability -- (F)aithfulness, (G)roundedness, (T)raceability, and (I)nterchangeability (FGTI) -- targeted at those needs. To illustrate the feasibility of implementing these principles, we develop the AnalyticScore framework as a baseline reference framework. When applied to the domain of text-based constructed-response scoring, AnalyticScore outperforms many uninterpretable scoring methods in terms of scoring accuracy and is, on average, within 0.06 QWK of the uninterpretable SOTA across 10 items from the ASAP-SAS dataset. By comparing against human annotators conducting the same featurization task, we further demonstrate that the featurization behavior of AnalyticScore aligns well with that of humans.

Interpretability from the Ground Up: Stakeholder-Centric Design of Automated Scoring in Educational Assessments

LLM-based evaluation systems (LLM judges) have emerged as a scalable alternative to expensive human evaluations. Although LLM judges demonstrate 70-80% agreement with human evaluators, their robustness under semantically equivalent prompt variations remains underexplored. Through systematic evaluation of 8 models across 4 NLG tasks using 10 semantically equivalent paraphrases per prompt (~115000 evaluations), we identify a critical accuracy-robustness gap: attribute verifiability affects the robustness more than model choice, with factually verifiable attributes achieving 0.71 accuracy versus 0.19 for subjective attributes. Our investigations discover three key insights: 1) Task structure characteristics influence the robustness and in turn accuracy, 2) Attribute verifiability as the strongest predictor-factually verifiable attribute achieve 0.71 accuracy versus 0.19 for subjective attributes, 3) No single winning model-smallest model (Llama-3.1-8B) exhibits second-best performance, while the strongest model (Llama-4) from the same family significantly lag behind, thus demonstrating that general capability improvements do not necessarily result in evaluation robustness. With these findings, we propose a diagnostic framework grounded in attribute verifiability that enables principled decisions about evaluation automation. Our work establishes new standards for assessing LLM judge reliability beyond simple accuracy metrics.

All Prompts Are Created Equal? Evaluating Robustness of LLM Judges Against Non-Adversarial Prompt Variations

Large language models (LLMs) are highly capable of answering questions, but they are often unaware of their own knowledge boundary, i.e., knowing what they know and what they don't know. As a result, they can generate factually incorrect responses on topics they do not have enough knowledge of, commonly known as hallucination. Rather than hallucinating, a language model should be more honest and respond with "I don't know" when it does not have enough knowledge about a topic. Many methods have been proposed to improve LLM honesty, but their evaluations lack robustness, as they do not take into account the knowledge that the LLM has ingested during its pretraining. In this paper, we propose a more robust evaluation benchmark dataset for LLM honesty by utilizing Pythia, a truly open LLM with publicly available pretraining data. In addition, we also propose a novel method for harnessing the pretraining data to build a more honest LLM.

 Parametric Knowledge is Not All You Need: Toward Honest Large Language Models via Retrieval of Pretraining Data

Short-form news videos increasingly shape public perception through strategic framing, yet existing verification methods largely overlook the communicative intent underlying such content. By emphasizing surface semantics, current models struggle to separate stylistic presentation from factual evidence, which leads to shortcut learning and brittle generalization. To address this limitation, we propose the Origin–Objective–Means (OOM) framework, a theory-grounded representation of communicative intent that captures creator stance, audience need activation, and communication strategy. We validate OOM through large-scale human annotation, revealing distinct and consistent lexical and structural patterns across intent dimensions. Building on this representation, we operationalize intent as an explicit semantic condition rather than a prediction target. Concretely, we introduce Intent-Guided Prompting (IGP) to condition LLM reasoning and intent-conditioned multimodal detection framework (ICMD), which injects intent into multimodal detectors via feature-wise modulation. Experiments on FakeSV and FakeTT show that modeling intent as an intermediate condition consistently improves accuracy and robustness across diverse vision–language backbones, while substantially reducing reliance on spurious stylistic correlations.

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Syntax as a Rosetta Stone: Universal Dependencies for In-Context Coptic Translation

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