United States

Privacy policies are essential for users to understand how service providers handle their personal data. However, these documents are often long and complex, as well as filled with technobabble and legalese, causing users to unknowingly accept terms that may even contradict the law. While summarizing and interpreting these privacy policies is crucial, there is a lack of high-quality English parallel corpus optimized for legal clarity and readability. To address this issue, we introduce APPSI-139, a high-quality English privacy policy corpus meticulously annotated by domain experts, specifically designed for summarization and interpretation tasks. The corpus includes 139 English privacy policies, 15,692 rewritten parallel corpora, and 36,351 fine-grained annotation labels across 11 data practice categories. Concurrently, we propose TCSI-pp-V2, a hybrid privacy policy summarization and interpretation framework that employs an alternating training strategy and coordinates multiple expert modules to effectively balance computational efficiency and accuracy. Experimental results show that the hybrid summarization system built on APPSI-139 corpus and the TCSI-pp-V2 framework outperform large language models, such as GPT-4o and LLaMA-3-70B, in terms of readability and reliability. The source code and dataset are available at https://github.com/EnlightenedAI/APPSI-139.

ACL 2026

APPSI-139: A Parallel Corpus of English Application Privacy Policy Summarization and Interpretation

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ACL-IJCNLP 2021

The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP).

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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.

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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.

Multimodal Large Language Models advance multimodal representation learning by acquiring transferable semantic embeddings, thereby substantially enhancing performance across a range of vision-language tasks, including cross-modal retrieval, clustering, and classification. An effective embedding is expected to comprehensively preserve the semantic content of the input while simultaneously emphasizing features that are discriminative for downstream tasks. Recent approaches demonstrate that MLLMs can be adapted into competitive embedding models via large-scale contrastive learning, enabling the simultaneous optimization of two complementary objectives. We argue that the two aforementioned objectives can be decoupled: a comprehensive understanding of the input enables the embedding model to achieve superior performance on downstream tasks via contrastive learning. In this paper, we propose CoMa, a compressed pre-training phase, which serves as a warm-up stage for contrastive learning. Experiments demonstrate that with only a small amount of pre-training data, we can transform an MLLM into a competitive embedding model. CoMa achieves new state-of-the-art results among MLLMs of comparable size on the MMEB, realizing optimization in both efficiency and effectiveness. Our project is available at https://github.com/Trustworthy-Information-Access/CoMa.

Compressing then Matching: An Efficient Pre-training Paradigm for Multimodal Embedding

Cross-lingual topic modeling aims to discover shared semantic structures across languages, yet existing models depend on sparse bilingual resources and often yield incoherent or weakly aligned topics. Recent LLM-based refinements improve interpretability but are costly, document-level, and prone to hallucination, with prior white-box approaches requiring inaccessible token probabilities. We propose LLM-XTM, a framework that integrates LLM-guided topic refinement with self-consistency uncertainty quantification, enabling black-box, stable, and scalable enhancement of cross-lingual topic models. Experiments on multilingual corpora show that LLM-XTM achieves superior topic coherence and alignment while reducing reliance on bilingual dictionaries and expensive LLM calls.

LLM-XTM: Enhancing Cross-Lingual Topic Models with Large Language Models

Automatic radiology report generation (RRG) has emerged as a promising approach to reduce clinicians' workload, yet existing systems are vulnerable to biases induced by spurious correlations across data, models, and evaluation pipelines. Such biases raise serious fairness concerns and may adversely affect patient care, making their mitigation critical in clinical settings. Leveraging causal inference to identify true cause-effect relationships can mitigate many biases and yield fair, reliable systems with clinically meaningful outputs. Existing surveys on RRG primarily emphasize deep learning approaches while overlooking the critical role of causality. This survey addresses this gap by analyzing bias across the RRG pipeline, formalizing RRG as a causal modeling problem, and reviewing representative causal techniques from the literature. Based on the level of intervention, we organize existing mitigation strategies into a three-tier taxonomy. We further examine commonly used public medical imaging datasets and evaluation metrics through a causal lens, revealing their biases and limitations in capturing causal alignment and clinical fidelity. To address these limitations, we advocate broader demographic coverage and causal-aware evaluation metrics to improve fairness and reliability, and identify important directions for future work.

Looking at Radiology Report Generation through a Causal Lens: A Survey

Modeling fine-grained speaking styles remains challenging for language-speech representation pre-training, as existing speech-text models are typically trained with coarse captions or task-specific supervision, and scalable fine-grained style annotations are unavailable. We present FCaps, a large-scale dataset with fine-grained free-text style descriptions, encompassing 47k hours of speech and 19M fine-grained captions annotated via a novel end-to-end pipeline that directly grounds detailed captions in audio, thereby avoiding the error propagation caused by LLM-based rewriting in existing cascaded pipelines. Evaluations using LLM-as-a-judge demonstrate that our annotations surpass existing cascaded annotations in terms of correctness, coverage, and naturalness. Building on FCaps, we propose CLSP, a contrastive language-speech pre-trained model that integrates global and fine-grained supervision, enabling unified representations across multiple granularities. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CLSP learns fine-grained and multi-granular speech-text representations that perform reliably across global and fine-grained speech-text retrieval, zero-shot paralinguistic classification, and speech style similarity scoring, with strong alignment to human judgments. Code and dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/yfyeung/CLSP.

Towards Fine-Grained and Multi-Granular Contrastive Language-Speech Pre-training

As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world settings, correctness alone is insufficient. Reliable deployment requires maintaining truthful beliefs under contextual perturbations. Existing evaluations largely rely on point-wise confidence like Self-Consistency, which can mask brittle belief. We show that even facts answered with perfect self-consistency can rapidly collapse under mild contextual interference. To address this gap, we propose \textbf{Neighbor-Consistency Belief (NCB)}, a structural measure of belief robustness that evaluates response coherence across a conceptual neighborhood. To validate the efficiency of NCB, we introduce a new \textbf{cognitive stress-testing protocol} that probes outputs stability under contextual interference. Experiments across multiple LLMs show that the performance of high-NCB data is relatively more resistant to interference. Finally, we present \textbf{Structure-Aware Training (SAT)}, which optimizes context-invariant belief structure and reduces long-tail knowledge brittleness by approximately \textbf{30%}.

Illusions of Confidence? Diagnosing LLM Truthfulness via Neighborhood Consistency

Knowledge distillation is crucial for compressing Large Language Models (LLMs), enabling smaller student models to learn from larger teacher models. However, existing LLM distillation methods overly rely on student-generated outputs, which may introduce generation errors and misguide the distillation process. Moreover, existing distillation loss functions struggle to align the most informative part due to the complex output distributions of LLMs. To address these problems, we propose a multi-granularity semantic revision method for LLM distillation. At the sequence level, we propose a sequence correction and re-generation (SCRG) strategy. SCRG identifies error tokens by calculating the semantic cognitive difference between teacher and student outputs, corrects them using teacher-generated tokens, and re-generates the sequence to minimize errors. At the token level, we design a distribution adaptive clipping Kullback-Leibler (DAC-KL) loss, which uses a learnable sub-network to focus on semantically dense areas of the teacher's output, reducing the impact of redundant information. At the span level, we utilize span priors to compute probability correlations within sequences, ensuring consistency between teacher and student outputs to enhance semantic information transfer. Extensive experiments on models ranging from 0.1B to 13B parameters demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach compared to existing methods.

Multi-Granularity Semantic Revision for Large Language Model Distillation

Language models often struggle to follow multi-constraint instructions that are crucial for real-world applications. Existing reinforcement learning (RL) approaches suffer from dependency on external supervision and sparse reward signals from multi-constraint tasks. We propose a label-free self-supervised RL framework that eliminates dependency on external supervision by deriving reward signals directly from instructions and generating pseudo-labels for reward model training. Our approach introduces constraint decomposition strategies and efficient constraint-wise binary classification to address sparse reward challenges while maintaining computational efficiency. Experiments show that our approach generalizes well, achieving strong improvements across 3 in-domain and 5 out-of-domain datasets, including challenging agentic and multi-turn instruction following. We will open-source our code and data to facilitate future research.

Instructions are all you need: Self-supervised Reinforcement Learning for Instruction Following

Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly rely on external tools to perform complex, realistic tasks, yet their ability to utilize the rapidly expanding Model Contextual Protocol (MCP) ecosystem remains limited. Existing MCP research covers few servers, depends on costly manual curation, and lacks training support, hindering progress toward real-world deployment. To overcome these limitations, we introduce MCP-Flow, an automated web-agent-driven pipeline for large-scale server discovery, data synthesis, and model training. MCP-Flow collects and filters data from 1166 servers and 11536 tools, producing 68733 high-quality instruction-function call pairs and 6439 trajectories, far exceeding prior work in scale and diversity. Extensive experiments demonstrate MCP-Flow's effectiveness in driving superior MCP tool selection, function-call generation, and enhanced agentic task performance. MCP-Flow thus provides a scalable foundation for advancing LLM agents' proficiency in real-world MCP environments.

MCP-Flow: Facilitating LLM Agents to Master Real-World, Diverse and Scaling MCP Tools

Reliable confidence is essential for trusting the outputs of LLMs, yet widely deployed post-trained LLMs (PoLLMs) typically compromise this trust with severe overconfidence. In contrast, we observe that their corresponding base LLMs often remain well-calibrated. This naturally motivates us to calibrate PoLLM confidence using the base LLM as a reference. This work proposes two ways to achieve this. A straightforward solution, BaseCal-ReEval, evaluates PoLLM's responses by feeding them into the base LLM to get average probabilities as confidence. While effective, this approach introduces additional inference overhead. To address this, we propose BaseCal-Proj, which trains a lightweight projection to map the final-layer hidden states of PoLLMs back to those of their base LLMs. These projected states are then processed by the base LLM's output layer to derive base-calibrated confidence for PoLLM's responses. Notably, BaseCal is an unsupervised, plug-and-play solution that operates without human labels or LLM modifications. Experiments across five datasets and three LLM families demonstrate the effectiveness of BaseCal, reducing Expected Calibration Error (ECE) by an average of 42.90% compared to the best unsupervised baselines.

BaseCal: Unsupervised Confidence Calibration via Base Model Signals

Current critic-free RL methods for large reasoning models suffer from severe inefficiency when training on positive homogeneous prompts (where all rollouts are correct), resulting in waste of rollouts due to zero advantage estimates. We introduce a radically simple yet powerful solution to \uline{M}ine \uline{in}trinsic mast\uline{er}y (Miner), that repurposes the policy's intrinsic uncertainty as a self-supervised reward signal, with no external supervision, auxiliary models, or additional inference cost. Our method pioneers two key innovations: (1) a token-level focal credit assignment mechanism that dynamically amplifies gradients on critical uncertain tokens while suppressing overconfident ones, and (2) adaptive advantage calibration to seamlessly integrate intrinsic and verifiable rewards. Evaluated across six reasoning benchmarks on Qwen3-4B and Qwen3-8B base models, Miner achieves state-of-the-art performance among the other four algorithms, yielding up to \textbf{4.58} absolute gains in Pass@1 and \textbf{6.66} gains in Pass@K compared to GRPO. Comparison with other methods targeted at exploration enhancement further discloses the superiority of the two newly proposed innovations. This demonstrates that latent uncertainty exploitation is both necessary and sufficient for efficient and scalable RL training of reasoning models. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/pixas/Miner}.

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Compressing then Matching: An Efficient Pre-training Paradigm for Multimodal Embedding

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