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Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) frequently hallucinate due to their reliance on fragile, linear reasoning and weak visual grounding. We propose Visual Attention Reasoning (VAR), a reinforcement learning framework that reformulates reasoning as a hierarchical search with self-verification. VAR enforces traceable evidence grounding by generating explicit bounding boxes, guided by a novel reward function combining geometric precision and semantic sufficiency. Furthermore, it replaces linear Chain-of-Thought with a tree-search policy capable of backtracking to correct logical errors. Theoretical analysis validates the framework&#39;s reliability, and extensive experiments demonstrate that VAR significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on complex hallucination and safety benchmarks.

ACL 2026

Visual Attention Reasoning via Hierarchical Search and Self-Verification

We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

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AAAI 2026

We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) frequently hallucinate due to their reliance on fragile, linear reasoning and weak visual grounding. We propose Visual Attention Reasoning (VAR), a reinforcement learning framework that reformulates reasoning as a hierarchical search with self-verification. VAR enforces traceable evidence grounding by generating explicit bounding boxes, guided by a novel reward function combining geometric precision and semantic sufficiency. Furthermore, it replaces linear Chain-of-Thought with a tree-search policy capable of backtracking to correct logical errors. Theoretical analysis validates the framework's reliability, and extensive experiments demonstrate that VAR significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on complex hallucination and safety benchmarks.

technical paper

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.

Recent advances in unified multimodal models indicate a clear trend towards comprehensive content generation. However, the auditory domain remains a significant challenge, with music and speech often developed in isolation, hindering progress towards universal audio synthesis. This separation stems from inherent task conflicts between semantic speech and structural music modeling, and severe data imbalances, which impede the development of a truly unified model. To address these challenges, we propose **UniMoE-Audio**, a unified speech and music generation model built upon a novel **D**ynamic-**C**apacity **M**ix-**o**f-**E**xperts (DCMoE) framework. Architecturally, UniMoE-Audio extends the conventional MoE paradigm by introducing a Top-$P$ routing strategy for adaptive capacity allocation. To tackle data imbalance, we introduce a three-stage training curriculum: 1) Independent Specialist Training leverages original datasets to instill domain-specific knowledge into each specialists without interference; 2) MoE Integration and Warmup incorporates these specialists into the UniMoE-Audio architecture, warming up the gate module and shared expert using a subset of balanced dataset; and 3) Synergistic Joint Training trains the entire model end-to-end on the fully balanced dataset, fostering enhanced cross-domain synergy. Extensive experiments show that UniMoE-Audio not only achieves state-of-the-art performance on major speech and music generation benchmarks, but also demonstrates superior synergistic learning, mitigating the performance degradation typically seen in naive joint training. Our findings highlight the substantial potential of specialized MoE architecture and curated training strategies in advancing universal audio generation.

UniMoE-Audio: Unified Speech and Music Generation with Dynamic-Capacity Mixture-of-Experts

Omni-modal large language models (OLLMs) offer a promising end-to-end solution for slide-enhanced speech recognition due to their inherent multimodal capabilities. However, we found a fundamental issue faced by OLLMs: \textit{Visual Interference}, where models show a bias towards visible text over auditory signals, causing them to hallucinate slide content that was never spoken. To address this, we propose Visually-Anchored Policy Optimization (VAPO), which aims to reshape models' inference process to follow the human-like ``Look-then-Listen'' inference chain. Specifically, we design a temporally decoupled policy: the model first extracts visual priors in a \<think> block to serve as semantic anchors, then generates the transcription in an \<answer> block. The policy is optimized via multi-objective reinforcement learning. Furthermore, we introduce SlideASR-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark designed to address the scarcity of entity-rich data, comprising a large-scale synthetic corpus for training and a challenging real-world test set for evaluation. We conduct extensive evaluations demonstrating that VAPO effectively eliminates visual interference and achieves state-of-the-art performance on SlideASR-Bench and public datasets, significantly reducing entity recognition errors in specialized domains.

VAPO: End-to-end Slide-Enhanced Speech Recognition with Omni-modal Large Language Models

Hausa texts are often characterized by writing anomalies such as incorrect character substitutions and spacing errors, which sometimes hinder natural language processing (NLP) applications. This paper presents an approach to automatically correct the anomalies by finetuning transformer-based models. Using a corpus gathered from several public sources, we create a large-scale parallel dataset of over 400,000 noisy-clean Hausa sentence pairs by introducing synthetically generated noise to mimic realistic writing errors. Moreover, we finetune several multilingual and African language models, including M2M100, AfriTeVA, NCAIR1/N-ATLaS, UBC-NLP/cheetah-base, and other variants of BART and T5 for this correction task. Our experimental results demonstrate that models such as M2M100 achieve state-of-the-art results despite their smaller size and distinct pretraining, and that correcting errors can have a significant impact in improving downstream tasks such as text classification, machine translation, question answering, and LLM prompting in general. This research provides a methodology, a publicly available dataset, and a comparison of models to improve Hausa text quality, thereby advancing NLP capabilities for the language and offering transferable insights for other low-resource languages.

Automatic Correction of Writing Anomalies in Hausa Texts

Recent advancements in Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have showcased strong performance across various reasoning tasks by leveraging System‑2 thinking capabilities. However, existing studies indicate that this reasoning ability alone does not reliably transfer to the general alignment domain. Inspired by cognitive science and how humans solve tasks, we argue that LRMs must be equipped with metacognitive knowledge to fully utilize their System‑2 capabilities. In this paper, we propose Priority‑Aware Metacognition (PAM), which guides the model to first identify the top‑level human preference (e.g., harmlessness) as a means of understanding the alignment task’s nature, and then apply other kinds of metacognitive knowledge to better monitor and regulate the model's thinking process. We implement PAM via a two-stage pipeline: a cold-start phase that collects structured metacognitive knowledge based on Flavell’s theoretical framework, and a preference-optimization phase that further reinforces such metacognition. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of PAM. Under the same training pipelines, PAM consistently yields higher performance, improving general domain alignment performance by \textasciitilde 10 points on the helpfulness and harmless benchmarks. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/PAM-RM-02DF.

PAM: Enhancing General Alignment of Large Reasoning Models through Priority-Aware Metacognition

Fine-tuning-as-a-service, while commercially successful for Large Language Model (LLM) providers, exposes models to harmful fine-tuning attacks. As a widely explored defense paradigm against such attacks, unlearning attempts to remove malicious knowledge from LLMs, thereby essentially preventing them from being used to perform malicious tasks. However, we highlight a critical flaw: the inherent general adaptability of LLMs allows them to easily bypass selective unlearning by rapidly relearning or repurposing their general capabilities for harmful tasks. To address this fundamental limitation, we propose a paradigm shift: instead of selective removal, we advocate for inducing model collapse, effectively forcing the model to ''unlearn everything'', specifically in response to updates characteristic of malicious adaptation. This collapse directly neutralizes the very general capabilities that attackers exploit, tackling the core issue unaddressed by selective unlearning. We introduce the Collapse Trap (CTRAP) as a practical mechanism to implement this concept conditionally. Embedded during alignment, CTRAP pre-configures the model's reaction to subsequent fine-tuning dynamics. If updates during fine-tuning constitute a persistent attempt to reverse safety alignment, the pre-configured trap triggers a progressive degradation of the model's core language modeling abilities, ultimately rendering it inert and useless for the attacker. Crucially, this collapse mechanism remains dormant during benign fine-tuning, ensuring the model's utility and general capabilities are preserved.

CTRAP: Embedding Collapse Trap to Safeguard Large Language Models from Harmful Fine-Tuning

Multimodal Continual Instruction Tuning (MCIT) is essential for adapting Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to dynamic data streams, yet preventing catastrophic forgetting remains a major challenge. Existing parameter-efficient approaches often face a dilemma: fixed architectures suffer from knowledge interference, while dynamic strategies incur inefficient capacity expansion, limiting scalability. We propose MoBLoRA (Mixture-of-Bases LoRA), a novel framework for MCIT. Motivated by our geometric analysis revealing subspace redundancy across sequential tasks, MoBLoRA shifts the paradigm from expert selection to subspace mixing: it decomposes adaptation weights into a globally shared pool of orthonormal bases to capture task-invariant knowledge, and lightweight mixing matrices to encode task-specific variations. This design effectively decouples knowledge accumulation from task reconstruction. Experiments on standard benchmarks show MoBLoRA significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods while maintaining superior parameter efficiency.

From Experts to Bases: Orthogonal Subspace Mixture for Continual Multimodal Instruction Tuning

Generating SVG-based fonts requires Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to translate high-level linguistic intent into low-level, topologically constrained symbolic sequences. However, current approaches struggle with two fundamental misalignments: the semantic ambiguity of unstructured natural language for precise geometric control, and the inefficiency of generic text tokenizers, which fragment coordinate-dense SVG XML into excessively long sequences with low information density. In this work, we propose Vector Calligrapher, a system that treats SVG generation as a conditional language modeling task optimized for both semantic grounding and representational efficiency.

To bridge the semantic gap, we introduce a structured linguistic supervision Font Description Framework that decomposes typographic style into interpretable linguistic dimensions (e.g., historical lineage, affective metaphors), providing structured supervision aligned with the compositional syntax of SVG. To address the tokenization bottleneck, we design a scalable separated-coordinate strategy that bypasses the vocabulary explosion of flattened tokens while significantly compressing sequence length. Supported by VectorFont, a dataset of over 10 million hierarchically annotated glyphs, our approach improves CLIP score by +23%, reduces geometric error by ≈48%, and boosts generation efficiency by achieving an 18% Command-per-Token (C/T) ratio---a 6× increase in information density over standard baselines. These results demonstrate that combining structured linguistic supervision with efficient symbolic tokenization is essential for reliable, controllable vector graphics synthesis. VectorFont dataset, Code and model weights will be publicly released.

Vector Calligrapher: Generating Scalable Vector Graphics via Structured Linguistic Supervision

As Large Language Model (LLM) agents increasingly leverage the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to operate in complex environments, the expansion of their action spaces offers agents unsafe capabilities and underscores the risk of power-seeking. While broad action space and greater environment influence are essential for task fulfillment, they creates a fragile risk surface where minor errors or hallucinations are magnified into catastrophic failures. In response, we propose SafeMCP, a server-side defense plugin that constrains tool acquisition via predictive reasoning regarding future safety risks. SafeMCP utilizes an internal world model for look-ahead reasoning to implement a two-tier defense: proactive tool filtering to constrain hazardous power expansion and immediate intervention as a fail-safe. To train SafeMCP, we introduce a three-stage pipeline comprising environmental dynamic grounding, safe policy initialization, and reinforcement learning (RL) with dual verifiable rewards. Experiments on PowerSeeking Bench, ToolEmu, and AgentHarm show that SafeMCP achieves a safe equilibrium, effectively mitigating risks while preserving agent utility.

SafeMCP: Proactive Power Regulation for LLM Agent Defense via Environment-Grounded Look-Ahead Reasoning

Role-playing agents (RPAs) require balancing multiple objectives, such as instruction following, persona consistency, and stylistic fidelity, which are not always perfectly aligned across different dimensions. While prior work has primarily relied on supervised fine-tuning or reinforcement learning with scalarized rewards, these approaches do not explicitly address the coordination of multiple reward dimensions during optimization. We present **MOA** (**M**ulti-**O**bjective **A**lignment), a reinforcement-learning framework that enables multi-dimensional, fine-grained rubric optimization for general RPAs. MOA introduces a novel multi-objective optimization strategy that trains simultaneously on multiple fine-grained rubrics to boost optimization performance. Besides, to address the issues of model output diversity and quality, we have also employed thought-augmented rollout with off-policy guidance. Experiments on PersonaGym and RoleMRC show that MOA consistently improves multi-dimensional role-playing performance over supervised and standard RL baselines. Under identical evaluation protocols, an 8B model trained with MOA reaches performance competitive with strong closed-source models across multiple evaluation dimensions. These results suggest that MOA provides a practical framework for training more capable general-purpose role-playing agents.

MOA: Multi-Objective Alignment for Role-Playing Agents

While LLMs are powerful embedding backbones, their application in training-free settings faces two structural challenges: causal attention restricts early tokens from accessing subsequent context, and the next-token prediction objective biases representations toward generation rather than semantic compression. To address these limitations, we propose KV-Embedding, a framework that activates the latent representation power of frozen LLMs. Our method leverages the observation that the key-value (KV) states of the final token at each layer encode a compressed view of the sequence. By re-routing these states as a prepended prefix, we enable all tokens to access sequence-level context within a single forward pass. To ensure model-agnostic applicability, we introduce an automated layer selection strategy based on intrinsic dimensionality. Evaluations on MTEB across Qwen, Mistral, and Llama backbones show that KV-Embedding outperforms existing training-free baselines by up to 10%, while maintaining robust performance on sequences up to 4,096 tokens. These results demonstrate that internal state manipulation offers an efficient alternative to input modification, and we hope this work encourages further exploration of LLM internals for representation learning.

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Look-Back: Implicit Visual Re-focusing in MLLM Reasoning

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