United States

Masked diffusion language models present a promising paradigm for language modeling, yet the systematic theoretical analysis and comprehensive empirical validation of their alignment on general tasks remain relatively underexplored. In this paper, we identify the primary challenge for this problem: the high variance in Evidence Lower Bound (ELBO)-based likelihood estimates required for preference optimization. To address this issue, we propose *Variance-Reduced Preference Optimization* (VRPO), a framework that formally analyzes the bias and variance of the preference optimization loss and gradient based on Direct Preference Optimization, showing both are governed by a score-estimator variance. Building on this foundation, we introduce multiple unbiased variance reduction strategies, including optimal budget allocation and antithetic sampling, to improve alignment performance. We demonstrate the effectiveness of VRPO by applying it to LLaDA, a large diffusion language model. The resulting model, LLaDA 1.5, consistently outperforms its SFT-only predecessor consistently across various general benchmarks, such as mathematics (GSM8K +4.7), coding (HumanEval +3.0, MBPP +1.8), and alignment (IFEval +4.0, Arena-Hard +4.3). Furthermore, LLaDA 1.5 demonstrates a highly competitive mathematical performance compared to other strong language MDMs and ARMs. Our model is available at https://huggingface.co/GSAI-ML/LLaDA-1.5.

ACL 2026

LLaDA 1.5: Variance-Reduced Preference Optimization for Large Language Diffusion Models

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.

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-26 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.

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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.

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

The rapid development of Large Language Models (LLMs) has transformed fake news detection and fact-checking tasks from simple classification to complex reasoning. However, evaluation frameworks have not kept pace. Current benchmarks are static, making them vulnerable to benchmark data contamination (BDC) and ineffective at assessing reasoning under temporal uncertainty. To address this, we introduce LiveFact a continuously updated benchmark that simulates the real-world "fog of war" in misinformation detection. LiveFact uses dynamic, temporal evidence sets to evaluate models on their ability to reason with evolving, incomplete information rather than on memorized knowledge. We propose a dual-mode evaluation: Classification Mode for final verification and Inference Mode for evidence-based reasoning, along with a component to monitor BDC explicitly. Tests with 22 LLMs show that open-source Mixture-of-Experts models, such as Qwen3-235B-A22B, now match or outperform proprietary state-of-the-art systems. More importantly, our analysis finds a significant "reasoning gap." Capable models exhibit epistemic humility by recognizing unverifiable claims in early data slices-an aspect traditional static benchmarks overlook. LiveFact sets a sustainable standard for evaluating robust, temporally aware AI verification.

LiveFact: A Dynamic, Time-Aware Benchmark for LLM-Driven Fake News Detection

Reliable Large Language Models (LLMs) should abstain when confidence is insufficient. However, prior studies often treat refusal as a generic "I don't know'', failing to distinguish input-level ambiguity (data uncertainty) from capability limitations (model uncertainty). This lack of distinction limits downstream action decisions like requesting clarification or invoking external tools.
In this work, we introduce UA-Bench, a benchmark of over 3,500 questions drawn from six datasets spanning knowledge-intensive and reasoning-intensive tasks, designed to evaluate explicit uncertainty attribution.
An evaluation of 18 frontier LLMs shows that even state-of-the-art models struggle to reliably discriminate between data uncertainty and model uncertainty, and that high answer accuracy does not necessarily imply strong uncertainty attribution ability.
To narrow this gap, we propose a lightweight data synthesis and reinforcement learning strategy. 
Experiments on both Qwen3-4B-Instruct-2507 and Qwen3-8B in thinking mode show that the proposed method improves uncertainty attribution while preserving answer accuracy.
Our code and data are publicly available now.

Beyond "I Don't Know": Evaluating LLM Self-Awareness in Discriminating Data and Model Uncertainty

Agentic LLM inference with long contexts is increasingly limited by memory bandwidth rather than compute. In this setting, SwiGLU MLP blocks, whose large weights exceed cache capacity, become a major yet under-optimized bottleneck in the Transformer architecture. We propose DeepFusionKernel, a deeply fused kernel that cuts HBM traffic and boosts cache reuse, delivering up to 13.2% speedup on H100 and 9.7% on A100 over SGLang. Integrated with SGLang and paired with a kernel scheduler, DeepFusionKernel ensures consistent accelerations across generation lengths, while remaining adaptable to diverse models, inference configurations, and hardware platforms.

 Deep Kernel Fusion for Transformers

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have advanced unified reasoning over text, images, and videos, but their inference is hindered by the rapid growth of key–value (KV) caches. Each visual input expands into thousands of tokens, causing caches to scale linearly with context length and remain resident in GPU memory throughout decoding, which leads to prohibitive memory overhead and latency even on high-end GPUs. A common solution is to compress caches under a fixed allocated budget at different granularities: token-level uniformly discards less important tokens, layer-level varies retention across layers, and head-level redistributes budgets across heads. Yet these approaches stop at allocation and overlook the heterogeneous behaviors of attention heads that require distinct compression strategies. We propose HybridKV, a hybrid KV cache compression framework that integrates complementary strategies in three stages: heads are first classified into static or dynamic types using text-centric attention; then a top-down budget allocation scheme hierarchically assigns KV budgets; finally, static heads are compressed by text-prior pruning and dynamic heads by chunk-wise retrieval. Experiments on 11 multimodal benchmarks with Qwen2.5-VL-7B show that HybridKV reduces KV cache memory by up to $7.9\times$ and achieves $1.52\times$ faster decoding, with almost no performance drop or even higher relative to the full-cache MLLM.

HybridKV: Hybrid KV Cache Compression for Efficient Multimodal Large Language Model Inference

The rise of Omni-modality Large Language Models (OLLMs) capable of jointly processing text, audio, and visual inputs marks a major step toward general intelligence. Ensuring their alignment with human preferences requires effective Omni-modality Reward Models (ORMs), which serve as surrogates for human judgment to guide OLLMs behavior. However, ORMs evaluation remains underdeveloped in the previous literature. Existing benchmarks are largely text-centric or limited to bimodal tasks, restricting comprehensive assessment for ORMs. To bridge this gap, we introduce Omni-RewardBench, the first benchmark for comprehensive evaluation of ORMs across modalities. In short, our contributions are threefold: (1) a hybrid automatic-annotation and human-verification pipeline to construct high-quality evaluation data; (2) extensive experiments on 20+ models, including inherently omni-modal and modality-bridged systems. Our experimental results demonstrate that current OLLMs fall short as reward models, revealing several common failure modes such as perception failure, modality dominance failure, and cross-modal fusion failure; and (3) strong correlations between Omni-RewardBench scores and downstream performance (IID r = 0.94, OOD r = 0.72), validating its reliability as a predictor of real-world capability and alignment quality.

Omni-RewardBench: Toward a Comprehensive Evaluation of Generative Reward Models Across Modalities

Vision-language models (VLMs) increasingly combine visual and textual information to perform complex tasks. However, conflicts between their internal knowledge and external visual input can lead to hallucinations and unreliable predictions. In this work, we investigate the mechanisms that VLMs use to resolve cross-modal conflicts by introducing WHOOPS-AHA!, a dataset of multimodal counterfactual queries that deliberately contradict internal commonsense knowledge. Through logit inspection, we identify a small set of attention heads that mediate this conflict. By intervening in these heads, we can steer the model towards its internal parametric knowledge or the visual information. Our results show that attention patterns on these heads effectively locate image regions that influence visual overrides, providing a more precise attribution compared to gradient-based methods.

When Seeing Overrides Knowing: Disentangling Knowledge Conflicts in Vision-Language Models

Language change both reflects and shapes social processes, and the semantic evolution of foundational concepts provides a measurable trace of historical and social transformation. Despite recent advances in diachronic semantics and discourse analysis, existing computational approaches often (i) concentrate on a single concept or a single corpus, making findings difficult to compare across heterogeneous sources, and (ii) remain confined to surface lexical evidence, offering insufficient computational and interpretive granularity when concepts are expressed implicitly. We propose HistLens, a unified, SAE-based framework for multi-concept, multi-corpus conceptual-history analysis. The framework decomposes concept representations into interpretable features and tracks their activation dynamics over time and across sources, yielding comparable conceptual trajectories within a shared coordinate system. Experiments on long-span press corpora show that HistLens supports cross-concept, cross-corpus computation of patterns of idea evolution and enables implicit concept computation. By bridging conceptual modeling with interpretive needs, HistLens broadens the analytical perspectives and methodological repertoire available to social science and the humanities for diachronic text analysis.

HistLens: Mapping Idea Change across Concepts and Corpora

Industry classification schemes are integral parts of public and corporate databases as they classify businesses based on economic activity. Due to the size of the company registers, manual annotation is costly, and fine-tuning models with every update in industry classification schemes requires significant data collection. We replicate the manual expert verification by using existing or easily retrievable multimodal resources for industry classification. We present MONETA, the first multimodal industry classification benchmark with text (Website, Wikipedia, Wikidata) and geospatial sources (OpenStreetMap and satellite imagery). Our dataset enlists 1,000 businesses in Europe with 20 economic activity labels according to EU guidelines (NACE). Our training-free baseline reaches 62.10% and 74.10% with open and closed-source Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLM). We observe an increase of up to 22.80% with the combination of multi-turn design, context enrichment, and classification explanations. We will release our dataset and the enhanced guidelines.

MONETA: Multimodal Industry Classification through Geographic Information with Multi Agent Systems

Though large language models (LLMs) have enabled great success across a wide variety of tasks, they still appear to fall short of one of the loftier goals of artificial intelligence research: creating an artificial system that can adapt its behavior to radically new contexts upon deployment. One important step towards this goal is to create systems that can induce rich representations of data that are seen in-context, and then flexibly deploy these representations to accomplish goals. Recently, Park et al. 2024 demonstrated that current LLMs are indeed capable of inducing such representation from context (i.e., in-context representation learning). The present study investigates whether LLMs can use these representations to complete simple downstream tasks.

We first assess whether open-weights LLMs can use in-context representations for next-token prediction, and then probe models using a novel task, adaptive world modeling. In both tasks, we find evidence that open-weights LLMs struggle to deploy representations of novel semantics that are defined in-context, even if they encode these semantics in their latent representations. Furthermore, we assess closed-source, state-of-the-art reasoning models on the adaptive world modeling task, demonstrating that even the most performant LLMs cannot reliably leverage novel patterns presented in-context. Overall, this work seeks to inspire novel methods for encouraging models to not only encode information presented in-context, but to do so in a manner that supports flexible deployment of this information.

Language Models Struggle to Use Representations Learned In-Context

The National Violent Death Reporting System (NVDRS) documents suicides in the United States. In a demanding public health data pipeline, annotators manually extract structured information from death investigation records following extensive codebooks (i.e. annotation guidelines) painstakingly developed by experts. In this work, we facilitate data-driven insights from the NVDRS data to support the development of novel suicide interventions by leveraging language models (LM) as assistants to these (a) data annotators and (b) experts. We find that LM predictions match existing data annotations about 85% of the time across 50 NVDRS variables. Where the LM disagrees with existing annotations, our expert review identifies that 38% of these instances reveal inconsistencies between narratives and structured data. Finally, we introduce a human-in-the-loop algorithm that helps experts efficiently build and refine codebooks for new variables by having them only focus on providing feedback for incorrect LM predictions. We apply our algorithm to a real-world case study, and find that about 96K narratives contain evidence of victim interactions with legal professionals, which surfaces a substantial opportunity for upstream intervention that is not captured in the original structured data. Our findings provide evidence that LMs can serve as effective assistants to public health researchers who handle sensitive data in high-stakes scenarios.

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LiveFact: A Dynamic, Time-Aware Benchmark for LLM-Driven Fake News Detection

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