United States

Mixture-of-Experts Multimodal Large Language Models (MoE MLLMs) suffer from a significant efficiency bottleneck during Expert Parallelism (EP) inference due to the straggler effect. This issue is worsened in the multimodal context, as existing token-count-based load balancing methods fail to address two unique challenges: (1) Information Heterogeneity, where numerous redundant visual tokens are treated equally to semantically critical ones, and (2) Modality Dynamics, where varying visual to text ratios across tasks lead to resource misallocation. To address these challenges, we propose MACS (Modality-Aware Capacity Scaling), a training-free inference framework. Specifically, MACS introduces an Entropy-Weighted Load mechanism to quantify the semantic value of visual tokens, addressing information heterogeneity. Additionally, the Dynamic Modality-Adaptive Capacity mechanism allocates expert resources based on the real-time modal composition of the input. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MACS significantly outperforms existing methods on various multimodal benchmarks, providing a novel and robust solution for the efficient deployment of MoE MLLMs in EP inference.

ACL 2026

MACS: Modality-Aware Capacity Scaling for Efficient Multimodal MoE Inference

We are pleased to announce the Thirty-Ninth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-25), which will be held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania at the Pennsylvania Convention Center from February 25 to March 4, 2025.

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-25 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.

### [Invited Speakers](https://aaai.org/conference/aaai/aaai-25/aaai-25-invited-speakers/)

Register [here](https://aaai.org/conference/aaai/aaai-25/registration/)

AAAI 2025

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-25 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.



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. 
[Full Message from General Chair Philipp Koehn](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QiJFOmMjvDgsDo3i1XzlQnImxe3RU_Cy/view?usp=sharing) 
<html><button style="display: inline-flex; align-items: center; justify-content: center; white-space: nowrap; border-radius: 9999px; font-weight: bold; background: #7c3aed; color: white; font-family: 'Space Grotesk', sans-serif; height: 40px; font-size: 16px; padding: 0 20px; border: none; cursor: pointer" onclick="window.open('https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QiJFOmMjvDgsDo3i1XzlQnImxe3RU_Cy/view?usp=sharing')">Conference Handbook</button></html>

To access this event page, you need to log in with the **email address you registered with**. Access credentials will be sent to your email from Underline - subject line "Welcome to ACL 2026". Please be sure to check your spam email folder if you do not see an email confirmation right away.

To access this event page, you are required to register.
Please complete your registration to continue.

We recommend reading [**the registration information**](https://2026.aclweb.org/registration/) first.

Registration Required

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

Insurance claims adjudication demands not only accurate decisions but also interpretable reasoning grounded in policy clauses. However, existing benchmarks are limited to information retrieval or simple multiple-choice setups, which fail to require step-by-step inferences from facts to conclusions. To address this gap, we introduce InsLogicBench, a benchmark providing complete reasoning traces that link factual inputs, relevant policy clauses, and final verdicts. We construct the dataset using a controllable synthesis framework based on the Nested Toulmin Model. By capturing the defeasible logic of insurance policies through hierarchical truth assignment and enforcing validity via consistency verification, we ensure interpretability and logical rigor across generated examples. We evaluate eight Large Language Models (LLMs) on InsLogicBench. Results show significant difficulties in handling exception clauses and verifying missing conditions. Notably, models often produce correct final decisions but fail to provide precise justifications, highlighting a critical discrepancy between their decision accuracy and logical reasoning capabilities.

InsLogicBench: An Argumentation Logic Grounded Benchmark for Complex Insurance Claims Adjudication

Prompt-based in-context learning (ICL) and parameter fine-tuning are two dominant paradigms for incorporating external information into large language models (LLMs), but they incur high inference costs or require expensive retraining. 
To bridge this gap, context-to-parameter mapping converts prompts into temporary adapter weights. 
However, we identify a critical failure mode in existing methods: *hidden-state collapse*, where the adapter-augmented model's internal states diverge sharply from the full-context oracle in deeper layers. 
We trace this failure to two coupled gaps: suboptimal **Input-Selection** and inadequate **Supervision-Signal**. 
To address these issues, we propose SADA (**S**tate-**A**ligned **D**istillation **A**dapters). 
We establish the *attention-block output* as a principled feature interface to improve input selection and introduce *state-alignment distillation* to enforce consistency between the adapter-augmented model and the full-context oracle. 
Experiments on long-context language modeling (PG19) and downstream NLU and summarization benchmarks show that SADA consistently outperforms strong baselines like *StreamAdapter* and *GenerativeAdapter*, achieving performance comparable to ICL while significantly reducing memory footprint and latency. 
We further analyze when parameterized context compression is effective and when explicit context retention remains preferable. 
Our code is available at [https://github.com/Taylor-Gavel/SADA.git](https://github.com/Taylor-Gavel/SADA.git).

SADA: Bridging In-Context Learning and Fine-Tuning via State-Aligned Distillation Adapters

Although camouflaged object segmentation has advanced rapidly in recent years, existing methods are still confined to visual mask prediction under fixed task assumptions. They cannot interactively respond to user requests, nor can they proactively understand and reason about the user’s intent. Our work tackles this issue by proposing a novel task, Language-Guided Reasoning Camouflaged Object Segmentation (LRCOS). Given a camouflaged image and an implicit query text instruction that requires reasoning, LRCOS aims to output intent-consistent segmentation mask. To establish a benchmark for this task, we build CamoQuery, comprising 12,437 image--mask samples and 25971 implicit query text instructions. To better reflect real-world camouflaged scenarios, we additionally collect MCD, a multi-instance camouflage dataset where multiple camouflaged targets co-exist within the same scene, increasing the need for reasoning. Building on CamoQuery, we further propose COSA, a vision--language segmentation assistant that segments the intended camouflaged object from implicit queries and produces a reasoning explanation. Experiments on CamoQuery demonstrate that COSA has strong reasoning segmentation capability in camouflaged scenes and exhibits zero-shot capability.

CamoQuery: Language-Guided Reasoning Camouflaged Object Segmentation

Criminal investigators and intelligence analysts have developed structured analytic techniques to evaluate competing hypotheses under incomplete information. This study examines whether such human expert investigative methodologies are also effective for narrative-based culprit inference in large language models (LLMs). Focusing on the task of analyzing evidence from complex narratives and identifying the perpetrator among suspects, we conducted experiments on 10 LLMs using the MuSR murder mystery benchmark. The PRISM framework, which applies investigative techniques, consistently outperformed existing general-purpose strategies across all models, with its effectiveness manifesting regardless of model scale. Ablation studies revealed that the hypothesis structuring stage is particularly crucial, accounting for 89% of the methodological improvement beyond information filtering. This suggests that domain-specific structures that specify “what to analyze” are more effective in LLM reasoning than simply increasing the number of reasoning paths.

Make LLMs See Like Investigators, Not Just Think More: The Role of Structured Analysis in Investigative Reasoning

Formalising informal mathematical reasoning into formally verifiable code is a significant challenge for large language models. In scientific fields such as physics, domain-specific machinery (\textit{e.g.} Dirac notation, vector calculus) imposes additional formalisation challenges that modern LLMs and agentic approaches have yet to tackle. To aid autoformalisation in scientific domains, we present FormalScience; a domain-agnostic human-in-the-loop agentic pipeline that enables a single domain expert (without deep formal language experience) to produce \textit{syntactically correct} and \textit{semantically aligned} formal proofs of informal reasoning for low economic cost. Applying FormalScience to physics, we construct FormalPhysics, a dataset of 200 university-level (LaTeX) physics problems and solutions (primarily quantum mechanics and electromagnetism), along with their Lean4 formal representations. Compared to existing formal math benchmarks, FormalPhysics achieves perfect formal validity and exhibits greater statement complexity. We evaluate open-source models and proprietary systems on a statement autoformalisation task on our dataset via zero-shot prompting, self-refinement with error feedback, and a novel multi-stage agentic approach, and explore autoformalisation limitations in modern LLM-based approaches. We provide the first systematic characterisation of semantic drift in physics autoformalisation in terms of concepts such as notational collapse and abstraction elevation which reveals what formal language verifies when full semantic preservation is unattainable. We release the codebase together with an interactive UI-based FormalScience system which facilitates autoformalisation and theorem proving in scientific domains beyond physics.\footnote{\url{https://github.com/jmeadows17/formal-science}}

FormalScience: Scalable Human-in-the-Loop Autoformalisation of Science with Agentic Code Generation in Lean

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in language understanding, reasoning, and generation, sparking growing interest in their creative potential. Realizing this potential requires systematic and scalable methods for evaluating creativity across diverse tasks. However, most existing creativity metrics are tightly coupled to specific tasks, embedding domain assumptions into the evaluation process, and limiting scalability and generality. To address this gap, we introduce an automated, domain-agnostic framework for quantifying LLM creativity across open-ended tasks. Our approach separates the measurement apparatus from the creative task itself, enabling scalable, task-agnostic assessment. Divergent creativity is measured using semantic entropy, a reference-free and robust metric for novelty and diversity, validated against human annotations, LLM-based novelty judgments and baseline diversity measures. Convergent creativity is assessed via a novel retrieval-based multi-agent judge framework that delivers context-sensitive evaluation of task fulfilment with over 60% improved efficiency. We validate our framework in three qualitatively distinct domains: problem-solving (MacGyver), research ideation (HypoGen), and creative writing (BookMIA), using a broad suite of LLMs. Empirical results show that our framework reliably captures key facets of creativity, including novelty, diversity, and task fulfilment, and reveal how model properties, such as size, temperature, recency, and reasoning, impact creative performance. Our work establishes a reproducible and generalizable standard for automated LLM creativity evaluation, paving the way for scalable benchmarking and accelerating progress in creative AI.

Automated Creativity Evaluation of Language Models Across Open-Ended Tasks

Automatic prompt optimization is a practical alternative to fine-tuning for adapting large language models (LLMs), yet existing approaches often trade off signal quality against computational cost. Methods that rely on generative feedback can be informative but expensive to scale, while sampling-based optimization typically requires many evaluations and exhibits high variance. Even loss-driven prompt optimization remains limited by costly segment attribution that scales with prompt length and by overfitting to a single evaluator, which weakens transfer across model families and domains. We propose Gradient-guided Multi-judge Prompt Optimization (GMPO), a scalable framework that improves both efficiency and robustness. GMPO uses a first-order gradient approximation to score segment importance in a continuous masking direction, requiring only one forward and one backward pass. GMPO further employs a generate multi-judge design in which candidate prompt edits are proposed by a generator and selected using cross-entropy losses aggregated from multiple lightweight judge models, reducing evaluator bias and improving generalization. Experiments across math, reasoning, instruction-following evaluation, and safety robustness benchmarks demonstrate consistent gains with substantially lower optimization overhead.

Gradient-Guided Multi-Judge Prompt Optimization

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong reasoning capabilities, and as existing approaches for enhancing LLM reasoning continue to mature, increasing attention has shifted toward meta-reasoning as a promising direction for further improvement. However, most existing meta-reasoning methods remain episodic: they focus on executing complex meta-reasoning routines within individual instances, but ignore the accumulation of reusable meta-reasoning skills across instances, leading to recurring failure modes and repeatedly high metacognitive effort. In this paper, we introduce Metacognitive Consolidation, a novel framework in which a model consolidates metacognitive experience from past reasoning episodes into reusable knowledge that improves future meta-reasoning. We instantiate this framework by structuring instance-level problem solving into distinct roles for reasoning, monitoring, and control to generate rich, attributable meta-level traces. These traces are then consolidated through a hierarchical, multi-timescale update mechanism that gradually forms evolving meta-knowledge. Experimental results demonstrate consistent performance gains across benchmarks and backbone models, and show that performance improves as metacognitive experience accumulates over time.

Beyond Meta-Reasoning: Metacognitive Consolidation for Self-Improving LLM Reasoning

Reliable verifiable data has become a key driver of capability gains in modern language models, enabling stable reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards and effective distillation that transfers competence across math, coding, and agentic tasks. Yet constructing generalizable synthetic verifiable data remains difficult due to hallucination-prone generation, and weak or trivial verification artifacts that fail to separate strong from weak solutions. Existing approaches often rely on task-specific heuristics or post-hoc filters that do not transfer across domains and lack a principled, universal evaluator of verifiability. In this work, we introduce an evolutionary, task-agnostic, strategy-guided, executably-checkable data synthesis framework that, from minimal seed supervision, jointly synthesizes problems, diverse candidate solutions, and verification artifacts, and iteratively discovers strategies via a consistency-based evaluator that enforces agreement between human-annotated and strategy-induced checks. This pipeline upgrades filtering into principled synthesis: it reliably assembles coherent, verifiable training instances and generalizes without domain-specific rules. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach under both RLVR and model distillation training paradigms. The results show that training with our synthesized data yields significant improvements on both the LiveCodeBench and AgentBench-OS tasks, highlighting the robust generalization of our framework.

Powering Verifiable Learning via Automated Evolutionary Data Synthesis

LLM agents have emerged as powerful systems for tackling multi-turn tasks by interleaving internal reasoning and external tool interactions. Agentic Reinforcement Learning has recently drawn significant research attention as a critical post-training paradigm to further refine these capabilities. In this paper, we present AT²PO (**A**gentic **T**urn-based **P**olicy **O**ptimization via **T**ree Search), a unified framework for multi-turn agentic RL that addresses three core challenges: limited exploration diversity, sparse credit assignment, and misaligned policy optimization. AT²PO introduces a turn-level tree structure that jointly enables Entropy-Guided Tree Expansion for strategic exploration and Turn-wise Credit Assignment for fine-grained reward propagation from sparse outcomes. Complementing this, we propose Agentic Turn-based Policy Optimization, a turn-level learning objective that aligns policy updates with the natural decision granularity of agentic interactions. ATPO is orthogonal to tree search and can be readily integrated into any multi-turn RL pipeline. Experiments across seven benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements over the state-of-the-art baseline by up to 1.84 percentage points in average, with ablation studies validating the effectiveness of each component.

Downloads

Next from ACL 2026

InsLogicBench: An Argumentation Logic Grounded Benchmark for Complex Insurance Claims Adjudication

Similar lecture

Assessing Modality Bias in Video Question Answering Benchmarks with Multimodal Large Language Models