China

Recent advancements in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) have improved large language models (LLMs) by incorporating external knowledge at inference time. Graph-based RAG systems have emerged as promising approaches, enabling multi-hop reasoning by organizing retrieved information into structured graphs. However, when knowledge graphs are constructed from unstructured documents using LLMs, they often suffer from fragmentation—resulting in disconnected subgraphs that limit inferential coherence and undermine the advantages of graph-based retrieval. To address these limitations, we propose ReGraphRAG, a novel framework designed to reconstruct and enrich fragmented knowledge graphs through three core components: Graph Reorganization, Perspective Expansion, and Query-aware Reranking. Experiments on four benchmarks show that ReGraphRAG outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving over 80% average diversity win rate. Ablation studies highlight the key contributions of graph reorganization and especially perspective expansion to performance gains. Our code is available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ReGraphRAG-7B73

EMNLP 2025

ReGraphRAG: Reorganizing Fragmented Knowledge Graphs for Multi-Perspective Retrieval-Augmented Generation

inference methods

retrieval-augmented generation

domain adaptation

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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ACL 2026

The 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026) will take place in San Diego, California, from July 2 - 7, 2026.

poster

## 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*

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

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in natural language tasks, yet their performance in dynamic, real-world financial environments remains underexplored. Existing approaches are confined to historical backtesting, where trading actions cannot influence market prices, and agents train on static data. To overcome this limitation, we present the Agent Trading Arena, a virtual zero-sum stock market in which LLM-based agents engage in competitive, mult-agent trading and directly impact price dynamics. By simulating realistic bid-ask interactions, our platform enables agents to train in scenarios that closely mirror live markets, thereby narrowing the gap between training and evaluation. Experiments show that LLMs struggle with numerical reasoning when given plain-text data, tending to overfit local patterns and recent values. In contrast, chart-based visualizations significantly boost both numerical reasoning and trading performance. Moreover, integrating a reflection module yields further improvements, especially with visual inputs. Finally, evaluations of the NASDAQ and CSI datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method, particularly under high volatility. All code and data are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Agent-Trading-Arena-8412.

Agent Trading Arena: A Study on Numerical Understanding in LLM-Based Agents

Competitive programming problems, due to their high reasoning difficulty and precise correctness feedback, have become a key benchmark for evaluating the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), playing a pivotal role in both LLM evaluation and reinforcement learning (RL) training. However, while available public datasets gather problems from platforms like Codeforces and somehow generate additional test cases, their test cases often fall short in quality compared to official ones, resulting in inaccurate evaluations. In this paper, we introduce an agent system that creates high-quality test cases for competitive programming problems. We apply this system to the CodeContests dataset and propose a new dataset with improved test cases, CodeContest+. We evaluated the accuracy of both using 1.72 million real-world submissions. Results show that CodeContests+ has a significantly higher evaluation accuracy than CodeContests and has better performance in RL training.

CodeContests+: High-Quality Test Case Generation for Competitive Programming

Long-context language models (LCLMs), characterized by their extensive context window, are becoming popular. However, despite they are nearly perfect at standard long-context retrieval tasks, our evaluations demonstrate they are not good at 2 basic cases, "multi-matching retrieval,'' and "logic-based retrieval'', which are beyond LCLMs' ability boundary. But we find they can be well addressed with a sufficient number of reasoning steps, guided by specific CoT prompts, indicating the potential necessity of combining long-context tasks with CoT methods for more advanced long context handling. However, purely CoT-based methods are too time-consuming when the context is very long, which means accurate and efficient long-context handling still has a long way to go.

Long-context Language Models Fail in Basic Retrieval Tasks Without Sufficient Reasoning Steps

The effectiveness of large language models (LLMs) to fact-check misinformation remains uncertain, despite their growing use. To this end, we present \texttt{CANDY}, a benchmark designed to systematically evaluate the capabilities and limitations of LLMs in fact-checking Chinese misinformation. Specifically, we curate a carefully annotated dataset of sim20k instances. Our analysis shows that current LLMs exhibit limitations in generating accurate fact-checking conclusions, even when enhanced with chain-of-thought reasoning and few-shot prompting. To understand these limitations, we develop a taxonomy to categorize flawed LLM-generated explanations for their conclusions and identify factual fabrication as the most common failure mode. Although LLMs alone are unreliable for fact-checking, our findings indicate their considerable potential to augment human performance when deployed as assistive tools in scenarios. Our dataset and code will be openly released. Data samples can be accessed at \url{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/CANDY-E9F8}.

CANDY: Benchmarking LLMs' Limitations and Assistive Potential in Chinese Misinformation Fact-Checking

Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in table Question Answering (Table QA). However, extending these capabilities to multi-table QA remains challenging due to unreliable schema linking across complex tables. Existing methods based on semantic similarity work well only on simplified hand-crafted datasets and struggle to handle complex, real-world scenarios with numerous and diverse columns. To address this, we propose a graph-based framework that leverages human-curated relational knowledge to explicitly encode schema links and join paths. Given a natural language query, our method searches this graph to construct interpretable reasoning chains, aided by pruning and sub-path merging strategies to enhance efficiency and coherence. Experiments on both standard benchmarks and a realistic, large-scale dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. To our knowledge, this is the first multi-table QA system applied to truly complex industrial tabular data.

Plugging Schema Graph into Multi-Table QA: A Human-Guided Framework for Reducing LLM Reliance

The evaluation of mathematical reasoning capabilities constitutes a critical pathway toward achieving Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Prevailing benchmarks including MATH and AIME mainly feature single-instantiation problems with fixed numbers, permitting pattern matching instead of principled deductive reasoning and leaving generalization on isomorphic problem variants untested. To address these limitations, we propose the UTMath Benchmark, employing rigorous unit testing methodology that simultaneously quantifies solution accuracy and solution space generality. It comprises 1,053 problems spanning 9 mathematical domains, each accompanied by an average of 68 varied test cases. With answer possibilities per problem on average, UTMath sets new standards for robust reasoning while preventing memorization. UTMath is highly challenging, with the best-performing model, o1-mini, solving only 32.57% of the problems, followed by o1-preview at 27.16%, and GPT-4o at 26.93%. We further propose Reasoning-to-Code Thoughts (RCoT), a prompting strategy that decouples symbolic reasoning from code synthesis. RCoT guides LLMs to first derive formal reasoning structures before generating executable code, producing generalizable solutions rather than situation-specific answers. To help the community push mathematical reasoning further, we release UTMath-Train (70k samples), a companion training set generated under the same protocol. Our benchmark can be accessed via the following link: [UTMath](https://anonymous.4open.science/r/UTMath-3356)

UTMath: A Benchmark for Math Evaluation with Unit Test

Graph-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) methods have significantly enhanced the performance of large language models (LLMs) in domain-specific tasks. However, existing RAG methods do not adequately utilize the naturally inherent hierarchical knowledge in human cognition, which limits the capabilities of RAG systems. In this paper, we introduce a new RAG approach, called HiRAG, which utilizes hierarchical knowledge to enhance the semantic understanding and structure capturing capabilities of RAG systems in the indexing and retrieval processes. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that HiRAG achieves significant performance improvements over the state-of-the-art baseline methods.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Hierarchical Knowledge

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) mitigates hallucination in Large Language Models (LLMs) by incorporating external data, with Knowledge Graphs (KGs) offering crucial information for question answering. Traditional Knowledge Graph Question Answering (KGQA) methods rely on semantic parsing, which typically retrieves knowledge strictly necessary for answer generation, thus often suffer from low coverage due to rigid schema requirements and semantic ambiguity. We present KERAG, a novel KG-based RAG pipeline that enhances QA coverage by retrieving a broader subgraph likely to contain relevant information. Our retrieval-filtering-summarization approach, combined with fine-tuned LLMs for Chain-of-Thought reasoning on knowledge sub-graphs, reduces noises and improves QA for both simple and complex questions. Experiments demonstrate that KERAG surpasses state-of-the-art solutions by about 7% in quality and exceeds GPT-4o (Tool) by 10-21%.

KERAG: Knowledge-Enhanced Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Advanced Question Answering

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong potential for tabular data generation by modeling textualized feature-value pairs. However, tabular data inherently exhibits sparse feature-level dependencies, where many feature interactions are structurally insignificant. This creates a fundamental mismatch as LLMs' self-attention mechanism inevitably distributes focus across all pairs, diluting attention on critical relationships, particularly in datasets with complex dependencies or semantically ambiguous features. To address this limitation, we propose GraDe (Graph-Guided Dependency Learning), a novel method that explicitly integrates sparse dependency graphs into LLMs' attention mechanism. GraDe employs a lightweight dynamic graph learning module guided by externally extracted functional dependencies, prioritizing key feature interactions while suppressing irrelevant ones. Our experiments across diverse real-world datasets demonstrate that GraDe outperforms existing LLM-based approaches by up to 12% on complex datasets while achieving competitive results with state-of-the-art approaches in synthetic data quality. Our method is minimally intrusive yet effective, offering a practical solution for structure-aware tabular data modeling with LLMs.

Not All Features Deserve Attention: Graph-Guided Dependency Learning for Tabular Data Generation with Language Models

Multi-label classification (MLC) faces persistent challenges from label imbalance, spurious correlations, and distribution shifts, especially in rare label prediction. We propose the Causal Cooperative Game (CCG) framework, which models MLC as a multi-player cooperative process. CCG integrates explicit causal discovery via Neural Structural Equation Models, a counterfactual curiosity reward to guide robust feature learning, and a causal invariance loss to ensure generalization across environments, along with targeted rare label enhancement. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that CCG significantly improves rare label prediction and overall robustness compared to strong baselines. Ablation and qualitative analyses further validate the effectiveness and interpretability of each component. Our work highlights the promise of combining causal inference and cooperative game theory for more robust and interpretable multi-label learning.

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Agent Trading Arena: A Study on Numerical Understanding in LLM-Based Agents

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