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Representing continuous time is a critical and under-explored challenge in modeling temporal event sequences with large language models (LLMs). Various strategies like byte-level representations or calendar tokens have been proposed. However, the optimal approach remains unclear, especially given the diverse statistical distributions of real-world event data, which range from smooth log-normal to discrete, spiky patterns. This paper presents a systematic empirical study of temporal tokenization for modeling event sequences with LLMs, comparing distinct encoding strategies: naive numeric strings, high-precision byte-level representations, human-semantic calendar tokens, classic uniform binning, and adaptive residual scalar quantization. We evaluate these strategies by fine-tuning LLMs on real-world datasets that exemplify these diverse distributions. Our analysis reveals that no single strategy is universally superior; instead, prediction performance depends heavily on aligning the tokenizer with the data&#39;s statistical properties, highlighting temporal tokenization as a critical yet often overlooked design dimension in LLM-based event modeling.

ACL 2026

Temporal Tokenization Strategies for Event Sequence Modeling with Large Language Models

event sequence modeling

temporal tokenization

large language models

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

Representing continuous time is a critical and under-explored challenge in modeling temporal event sequences with large language models (LLMs). Various strategies like byte-level representations or calendar tokens have been proposed. However, the optimal approach remains unclear, especially given the diverse statistical distributions of real-world event data, which range from smooth log-normal to discrete, spiky patterns. This paper presents a systematic empirical study of temporal tokenization for modeling event sequences with LLMs, comparing distinct encoding strategies: naive numeric strings, high-precision byte-level representations, human-semantic calendar tokens, classic uniform binning, and adaptive residual scalar quantization. We evaluate these strategies by fine-tuning LLMs on real-world datasets that exemplify these diverse distributions. Our analysis reveals that no single strategy is universally superior; instead, prediction performance depends heavily on aligning the tokenizer with the data's statistical properties, highlighting temporal tokenization as a critical yet often overlooked design dimension in LLM-based event modeling.

workshop paper

We introduce EconWebArena, a benchmark for evaluating autonomous agents on complex, multimodal economic tasks in realistic web environments. The benchmark comprises 360 curated tasks from 82 authoritative websites spanning domains such as macroeconomics, labor, finance, trade, and public policy. Each task challenges agents to navigate live websites, interpret structured and visual content, interact with real interfaces, and extract precise, time-sensitive data through multi-step workflows. We construct the benchmark by prompting multiple large language models (LLMs) to generate candidate tasks, followed by rigorous human curation to ensure clarity, feasibility, and source reliability. Unlike prior work, EconWebArena emphasizes fidelity to authoritative data sources and the need for grounded web-based economic reasoning. We evaluate a diverse set of state-of-the-art multimodal LLMs as web agents, analyze failure cases, and conduct ablation studies to assess the impact of visual grounding, plan-based reasoning, and interaction design. Our results reveal substantial performance gaps and highlight persistent challenges in grounding, navigation, and multimodal understanding, positioning EconWebArena as a rigorous testbed for economic web intelligence.

EconWebArena: Benchmarking Autonomous Agents on Economic Tasks in Realistic Web Environments

Accurate chart comprehension represents a critical challenge in advancing multimodal learning systems, as extensive information is compressed into structured visual representations. However, existing vision-language models (VLMs) frequently struggle to generalize on unseen charts because it requires abstract, symbolic, and quantitative reasoning over structured visual representations. In this work, we introduce Chart-RL, an effective reinforcement learning (RL) method that employs mathematically verifiable rewards to enhance chart question answering in VLMs. Our experiments demonstrate that Chart-RL consistently outperforms supervised fine-tuning (SFT) across different chart understanding benchmarks, achieving relative improvements of 16.7% on MultiChartQA, and 11.5% on ChartInsights. We conduct robustness analysis, where Chart-RL achieves enhanced performance in 18 of 25 perturbed chart categories, demonstrating strong consistency and reasoning capability across visual variations. Furthermore, we demonstrate that task difficulty and inherent complexity are more critical than data quantity in RL training. For instance, Chart-RL trained on merely 10 complex chart-query examples significantly outperforms models trained on over 6,000 simple examples. Additionally, training on challenging reasoning tasks not only improves in-domain generalization relative to simpler tasks, but also facilitate strong transfer to out-of-domain visual mathematical problems.

Chart-RL: Generalized Chart Comprehension via Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards

When a language model answers a table question, users have no way to verify which cells informed which reasoning steps. We introduce RSAT, a method that trains small language models (SLMs, 1–8B) to produce step-by-step reasoning with cell-level citations grounded in table evidence. Phase 1 (SFT) teaches a structured JSON output format from verified reasoning traces. Phase 2 (GRPO) optimizes a composite reward centered on NLI-based faithfulness, alongside citation validity and parsimony. Across six models from two families—Qwen2.5 (1.5B/3B/7B) and Llama3 (1B/3B/8B)—RSAT improves faithfulness 3.7$\times$ over SFT alone (0.224$\rightarrow$0.826), with near-perfect citation validity (0.992). Post-hoc attribution collapses below 13\% format success, confirming that attribution must be integrated into reasoning, not retrofitted. Ablations show the faithfulness reward is essential: removing it drops faithfulness from 0.97 to 0.03.

RSAT: Structured Attribution Makes Small Language Models Faithful Table Reasoners

Prompting schemes such as Chain of Thought, Tree of Thoughts, and Graph of Thoughts can significantly enhance the reasoning capabilities of large language models. However, most existing schemes require users to define static, problem-specific reasoning structures that lack adaptability to dynamic or unseen problem types. Additionally, these schemes are often under-optimized in terms of hyperparameters, prompts, runtime, and prompting cost. To address these limitations, we introduce Framework of Thoughts (FoT) – a general-purpose foundation framework for implementing and optimizing dynamic reasoning schemes. FoT comes with built-in features for hyperparameter tuning, prompt optimization, parallel execution, and intelligent caching, unlocking the latent performance potential of reasoning schemes. We demonstrate FoT’s capabilities by implementing three popular schemes – Tree of Thoughts, Graph of Thoughts, and ProbTree – within FoT. We empirically show that FoT enables significantly faster execution, reduces costs, and achieves better task scores through optimization. We release our codebase to facilitate the development of future dynamic and efficient reasoning schemes.

Framework of Thoughts: A Foundation Framework for Dynamic and Optimized Reasoning based on Chains, Trees, and Graphs

Tabular anomaly detection is challenging because real-world tables contain heterogeneous columns, ranging from structured identifiers to free-form text. Existing methods face a fundamental trilemma: rule-based systems require extensive manual configuration and fail on novel schemas; statistical methods scale efficiently but miss semantic errors; and LLM-based approaches understand semantics but incur prohibitive per-cell inference costs. No prior method simultaneously addresses semantic heterogeneity, domain-specific validation rules, and enterprise-scale processing.

We introduce TabGuard, an agentic framework that resolves this trilemma through semantic routing. Using LLM function calling, the system analyzes a small sample of each column and dynamically selects the most effective validation strategy, routing to a regex-based validator for syntactic patterns, a code-generation validator for domain-specific rules (such as Luhn checksums for credit cards), or an embedding-based validator for distributional outliers. This architecture decouples expensive cognitive reasoning ($O(m)$ LLM calls for $m$ columns) from scalable programmatic execution, enabling deployment on enterprise datasets without per-cell inference.

TabGuard: Agentic LLM Orchestration for Adaptive Tabular Anomaly Detection via Dynamic Validator Selection and Generation

Large language models have shown impressive capabilities in code generation, yet they often produce functionally incorrect code. Uncertainty quantification (UQ) methods have emerged as a promising approach for detecting hallucinations in natural language generation, but their effectiveness for code generation tasks remains underexplored. We systematically evaluate how UQ techniques transfer to code generation across three programming languages, five LLMs, and over 1,700 problems. We find that some token-probability-based methods generalize effectively without modification, while sampling-based methods relying on natural language inference (NLI) fail because NLI models cannot distinguish functionally different code, causing most responses to collapse into a single semantic cluster. To address this, we introduce \emph{functional equivalence methods}, a family of code-specific methods that replace NLI-based semantic equivalence with an LLM-based functional equivalence assessment, including functional entropy, a code-specific analog of semantic entropy. Functional equivalence methods achieve top AUROC in 11 out of 15 model-benchmark combinations and the best calibration across most settings, consistently outperforming both NLI-based counterparts and all other methods evaluated.

Functional Entropy: Predicting Functional Correctness in LLM-Generated Code with Uncertainty Quantification

The rapid growth of scientific publications makes it increasingly difficult to track and synthesize research progress. While Large Language Models (LLMs) can support automated survey generation, existing methods retrieve unstructured data and require models to infer conceptual, methodological, and taxonomic relations from raw text at generation time. We introduce STRUCTSURVEY, a hierarchical multiagent framework that shifts structural reasoning from generation to retrieval by dynamically constructing graph-based representations of entities, relations, and topical taxonomies. We evaluate STRUCTSURVEY on a new referencegrounded benchmark of ACL survey papers for reproducible long-form scientific summarization. Compared with embedding-only retrieval baselines, STRUCTSURVEY improves ROUGE1 recall by +2.9 and ROUGE-2 recall by +1.0 on average, without reducing precision. It also improves LLM-as-a-Judge ratings for logical structure, depth, and synthesis, showing that explicit structural retrieval yields surveys closer to human-written organization and reasoning.

StructSurvey: Structured Agentic Retrieval for Automated Survey Paper Generation

In this work, we explore the Large Language Model (LLM) agent reviewer dynamics in an Elo-ranked review system using real-world conference paper submissions. Multiple LLM agent reviewers with different personas engage in multi round review interactions moderated by an Area Chair. We compare a baseline setting with conditions that incorporate Elo ratings and reviewer memory. Our simulation results showcase several interesting findings, including how incorporating Elo improves Area Chair decision accuracy, as well as reviewers' adaptive review strategies that exploits our Elo system without improving review effort. These findings show how the Elo system affects peer review and offer insights for improving AI conference evaluation. Our code is available at https://github.com/hsiangwei0903/EloReview.

Modeling LLM Agent Reviewer Dynamics in Elo-Ranked Review System

Language models are often used for tasks involving structured data like tables and graphs, but there is no principled approach for choosing the best format to represent such data for fine-tuning. We address this in three steps. First, we show that format choice remains important even after fine-tuning; models learn more efficiently with specific formats rather than adapting to any format. Second, we show that a pre-trained model can suggest its own candidate formats by auto-completing partial prompts, reducing reliance on developer intuition. Third, and most importantly, we demonstrate that base model performance across formats reliably predicts post-fine-tuning performance: the format that performs best before fine-tuning remains among the top candidates after fine-tuning in 16 out of 18 settings across three data structure types, three models, and six tasks. This finding allows format selection to be done via inference alone, avoiding costly trial-and-error fine-tuning runs.

Asking language models how to represent data for fine-tuning

Table reasoning remains challenging for Large Language Models (LLMs) as it requires integrating structured tabular information with natural language questions. Previous SQL-based approaches rely on surface-level alignment between question keywords and column headers, often generating queries with spurious or missing column mappings. 
We introduce TabBridge, a framework that incorporates both structural and contextual information for accurate table reasoning. TabBridge first generates a unified textual representation called Table Specification (TabSpec), preserving the structural information through row and column analysis. In order to ensure accuracy and consistency, we also employ a reconstruction-based evaluation mechanism to verify and refine the generated TabSpec. TabSpec is subsequently used to generate SQL aligned with the contextual intent of the question, enabling accurate interpretation of column semantics that are often overlooked by previous approaches.
Across three public benchmarks, TabBridge shows consistent improvements over previous SQL-based methods, achieving 73.94\% accuracy on WikiTableQuestions (+5.3 pp over the previous state of the art). TabBridge also demonstrates robust performance across diverse LLM backbones, confirming its generalizability across model architectures. Our code is available at https://github.com/raylee0519/TabBridge.

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