Morocco

Multimodal Small-to-Medium sized Language Models (MSLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in integrating visual and textual information but still face significant limitations in visual comprehension and mathematical reasoning, particularly in geometric problems with diverse levels of visual infusion. Current models struggle to accurately decompose intricate visual inputs and connect perception with structured reasoning, leading to suboptimal performance. To address these challenges, we propose SpatialMath, a novel Spatial Comprehension-Infused Symbolic Reasoning Framework designed to integrate spatial representations into structured symbolic reasoning chains. SpatialMath employs a specialized perception module to extract spatially-grounded representations from visual diagrams, capturing critical geometric structures and spatial relationships. These representations are then methodically infused into symbolic reasoning chains, facilitating visual comprehension-aware structured reasoning. To this end, we introduce MATHVERSE-PLUS, a novel dataset containing structured visual interpretations and step-by-step reasoning paths for vision-intensive mathematical problems. SpatialMath significantly outperforms strong multimodal baselines, achieving up to 10 percentage points improvement over supervised fine-tuning with data augmentation in vision-intensive settings. Robustness analysis reveals that enhanced spatial representations directly improve reasoning accuracy, reinforcing the need for structured perception-to-reasoning pipelines in MSLMs.

EACL 2026

SpatialMath: Spatial Comprehension-Infused Symbolic Reasoning for Mathematical Problem-Solving

multimodal small language model

visual math comprehension

visual math reasoning

large language model

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

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

technical paper

#### *Message from the General Chair, Aline Villavicencio*
I’m delighted and honoured to welcome you to the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL 2026), taking place in the beautiful city of Rabat, in Morocco, in March 24-29, 2026. EACL is the flagship European conference of the Association and EACL 2026 proudly continues our field’s tradition of excellence in scholarship, innovation, and inclusivity. I am deeply grateful to the many volunteers whose dedication, generosity, and tireless efforts have made this conference possible.
For the first time EACL is being hosted in the African continent. This is an important milestone for our community, and we are grateful to our Moroccan hosts for enabling this historic moment by bringing this edition of EACL to Rabat. We are also delighted that the Second Arabic NLP School is co-located with EACL. We hope attendees enjoy this wonderful opportunity to strengthen ties with the Computational Linguistics communities across the African continent. *[Read full message](https://drive.google.com/file/d/14NlmHvwM6fPJuMmOvVh7K0vtQbEyv3SZ/view?usp=sharing)* 

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Welcome to the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL). EACL 2026 will be held in Rabat, Morocco, from March 24–29, 2026. 

Scripting interfaces enable users to automate tasks and customize software workflows, but creating scripts traditionally requires programming expertise and familiarity with specific APIs, posing barriers for many users. While Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate code from natural language queries, runtime code generation is severely limited due to unverified code, security risks, longer response times, and higher computational costs. To bridge the gap, we propose an offline simulation framework to curate a software-specific skillset—a collection of verified scripts—by exploiting LLMs and publicly available scripting guides. Our framework comprises two components: (1) task creation, using top-down functionality guidance and bottom-up API synergy exploration to generate helpful tasks; and (2) skill generation with trials, refining and validating scripts based on execution feedback. To efficiently navigate the extensive API landscape, we introduce a Graph Neural Network (GNN)-based link prediction model to capture API synergy, enabling the generation of skills involving underutilized APIs and expanding the skillset’s diversity. Experiments with Adobe Illustrator demonstrate that our framework significantly improves automation success rates, reduces response time, and saves runtime token costs compared to traditional runtime code generation. This is the first attempt to use software scripting interfaces as a testbed for LLM-based systems, highlighting the advantages of leveraging execution feedback in a controlled environment and offering valuable insights into aligning AI capabilities with user needs in specialized software domains.

Skill Discovery for Software Scripting Automation via Offline Simulations with LLMs

Linear concept vectors effectively steer LLMs, but existing methods suffer from noisy features in diverse datasets that undermine steering robustness. We propose Sparse Autoencoder-Denoised Concept Vectors (SDCV), which selectively keep the most discriminative SAE latents while reconstructing hidden representations. Our key insight is that concept-relevant signals can be explicitly separated from dataset noise by scaling up activations of top-k latents that best differentiate positive and negative samples. Applied to linear probing and difference-in-mean, SDCV consistently improves steering success rates by 4-16% across six challenging concepts, while maintaining topic relevance.

Denoising Concept Vectors with Sparse Autoencoders for Improved Language Model Steering

Clinical diagnosis is time-consuming, requiring intensive interactions between patients and medical professionals. While large language models (LLMs) could ease the pre-diagnostic workload, their limited domain knowledge hinders effective medical question generation. We introduce a Knowledge Graph-augmented LLM with active in-context learning to generate relevant and important follow-up questions, KG-Followup, serving as a critical module for the pre-diagnostic assessment. The structured medical domain knowledge graph serves as a seamless patch-up to provide professional domain expertise upon which the LLM can reason. Experiments demonstrate that KG-Followup outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 8%+ on curated ClinicalInquiryBench and 5%+ on FollowupBench in recall.

Linking Knowledge to Care: Knowledge Graph-Augmented Medical Follow-Up Question Generation

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) can substantially enhance the performance of LLMs on knowledge-intensive tasks. Various RAG paradigms—including vanilla, planning-based, and iterative RAG—all depend on a robust retriever, yet existing retrievers rely heavily on public knowledge and often falter when faced with domain-specific queries. To address these limitations, we introduce DRAGON, a framework that combines a data-construction modeling approach with a scalable synthetic data-generation pipeline, specifically designed to optimize domain-specific retrieval performance and bolster retriever robustness. To evaluate RAG performance on domain-specific RAGs, we propose DRAGONBench, a benchmark spanning 8 domain-specific document collections across 4 distinct fields and featuring a wide spectrum of query complexities, answerability, and hops. Leveraging DRAGON, we generate a large-scale synthetic dataset—encompassing both single-hop and multi-hop queries—to enrich retriever training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that retrievers trained on this data yield significant performance gains and exhibit strong cross-domain generalization. Moreover, when our optimized retrievers are integrated into vanilla, planning-based, and iterative RAG paradigms, we observe consistent end-to-end improvements in system accuracy.

DRAGON: Domain-specific Robust Automatic Data Generation for RAG Optimization

Cultural evaluation of large language models has become increasingly important, yet current benchmarks often reduce culture to static facts or homogeneous values. This view conflicts with anthropological accounts that emphasize culture as dynamic, historically situated, and enacted in practice. To analyze this gap, we introduce a four-part framework that categorizes how benchmarks frame culture, such as knowledge, preference, performance, or bias. Using this lens, we qualitatively examine 20 cultural benchmarks and identify six recurring methodological issues, including treating countries as cultures, overlooking within-culture diversity, and relying on oversimplified survey formats. Drawing on established anthropological methods, we propose concrete improvements: incorporating real-world narratives and scenarios, involving cultural communities in design and validation, and evaluating models in context rather than isolation. Our aim is to guide the development of cultural benchmarks that go beyond static recall tasks and more accurately capture the responses of the models to complex cultural situations.

Hire Your Anthropologist! Rethinking Culture Benchmarks Through an Anthropological Lens

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved impressive capabilities in various context-based text generation tasks, such as summarization and reasoning; however, their applications in intention-based generation tasks remain underexplored. One such example is revision generation, which requires the generated text to explicitly reflect the writer's actual intentions. Identifying intentions and generating desirable revisions are challenging due to their complex and diverse nature. Although prior work has employed LLMs to generate revisions with few-shot learning, they struggle with handling entangled multi-intent scenarios. While fine-tuning LLMs using intention-based instructions appears promising, it demands large amounts of annotated data, which is expensive and scarce in the revision community. To address these challenges, we propose Intention-Tuning, an intention-adaptive layer-wise LLM fine-tuning framework that dynamically selects a subset of LLM layers to learn the intentions and subsequently transfers their representations to revision generation. Experimental results suggest that Intention-Tuning is effective and efficient on small revision corpora, outperforming several PEFT baselines.

Intention-Adaptive LLM Fine-Tuning for Text Revision Generation

Contemporary advancements in language model reasoning typically require computationally intensive reinforcement learning (RL) and massive datasets, creating barriers for resource-constrained teams. In this work, we demonstrate that high-quality, iterative training on minimal data can rival modern RL approaches. We introduce a resource-efficient framework that combines Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) and Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) with selective guidance from larger models, iteratively refining solutions through a "reflect, rewrite, repeat" cycle (R). Using Qwen-2.5-7B and Qwen 2.5-Math-7B as base models, our method shows meaningful performance improvements across arithmetic, symbolic and cognitive reasoning benchmarksвЂ”including GSM8K (83.1% в†’ 88.6%), AIME'25@10 (20.0% в†’ 30.0%) and LastLetterConcat (40.7% в†’ 53.3%) problems. The model-agnostic nature of our R framework is further demonstrated through substantial improvements when applied to Mistral and LLaMA-based models. Remarkably, these gains are achieved using mere 700 basic arithmetic training samples, in stark contrast to the hundreds of thousands of examples typically required by RL-based systems. Our results suggest that reasoning improvements need not strictly depend on large-scale data. By emphasizing strategically curated training grounded in foundational principles, we achieve competitive generalization with minimal resource overhead. Our R pipeline also generates high-quality SFT data with high-fidelity reasoning traces as byproduct, further enabling scalable and annotation-free fine-tuning.

Reflect, Rewrite, Repeat: How Simple Arithmetic Enables Advanced Reasoning in Small Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) often struggle with complex mathematical reasoning, where prose-based generation leads to unverified and arithmetically unsound solutions. Current prompting strategies like Chain of Thought still operate within this unreliable medium, lacking a mechanism for deterministic verification. To address these limitations, we introduce SymCode, a neurosymbolic framework that reframes mathematical problem-solving as a task of verifiable code generation using the SymPy library. We evaluate SymCode on challenging benchmarks, including MATH-500 and OlympiadBench, demonstrating significant accuracy improvements of up to 13.6 percentage points over baselines. Our analysis shows that SymCode is not only more token-efficient but also fundamentally shifts model failures from opaque logical fallacies towards transparent, programmatic errors. By grounding LLM reasoning in a deterministic symbolic engine, SymCode represents a key step towards more accurate and trustworthy AI in formal domains.

SymCode: A Neurosymbolic Approach to Mathematical Reasoning via Verifiable Code Generation

Distilling advanced Large Language Models' instruction-following capabilities into smaller models using a selected subset has become a mainstream approach in model training. While existing synthetic instruction data selection strategies rely mainly on single-dimensional signals (i.e., reward scores, model perplexity), they fail to capture the complexity of instruction-following across diverse fields. Therefore, we investigate more diverse signals to capture comprehensive instruction-response pair characteristics and propose three foundational metrics that leverage Multi-LLMs wisdom, informed by (1) diverse LLM responses and (2) reward model assessment. Building upon base metrics, we propose CROWDSELECT, an integrated metric incorporating a clustering-based approach to maintain response diversity. Our comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our foundation metrics consistently improve performance across 4 base models on MT-bench and Arena-Hard. CROWDSELECT, efficiently incorporating all metrics, achieves state-of-the-art performance in both Full and LoRA fine-tuning, showing improvements of 4.81% on Arena-Hard and 11.1% on MT-bench with Llama-3.2-3b-instruct. We hope our findings will bring valuable insights for future research in this direction.

CROWDSELECT: SyntheticInstruction Data Selection with Multi-LLM Wisdom

We conduct a systematic audit of three widely used reasoning benchmarks, SocialIQa, FauxPas-EAI, and ToMi, and uncover pervasive flaws in both benchmark items and evaluation methodology. Using five LLMs (GPT-{3, 3.5, 4, o1}, and LLaMA 3.1) as diagnostic tools, we identify structural, semantic, and pragmatic issues in benchmark design (e.g., duplicated items, ambiguous wording, and implausible answers), as well as scoring procedures that prioritize output form over reasoning process. Through systematic human annotation and re-evaluation on cleaned benchmark subsets, we find that model scores often improve not due to due to erratic surface wording variations and not to improved reasoning. Infact, further analyses show that model performance is highly sensitive to minor input variations such as context availability and phrasing, revealing that high scores may reflect alignment with format-specific cues rather than consistent inference based on the input. These findings challenge the validity of current benchmark-based claims about reasoning in LLMs, and highlight the need for evaluation protocols that assess reasoning as a process of drawing inference from available information, rather than as static output selection. We release audited data and evaluation tools to support more interpretable and diagnostic assessments of model reasoning.

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