United States

Standardized patients (SPs) are indispensable for clinical skills training but remain expensive and difficult to scale. Although large language model (LLM)-based virtual standardized patients (VSPs) have been proposed as an alternative, their behavior remains unstable and lacks rigorous comparison with human standardized patients. We propose EasyMED, a multi-agent VSP framework that separates case-grounded information disclosure from response generation to support stable, inquiry-conditioned patient behavior. We also introduce SPBench, a human-grounded benchmark with eight expert-defined criteria for interaction-level evaluation. Experiments show that EasyMED more closely matches human SP behavior than existing VSPs, particularly in case consistency and controlled disclosure. A four-week controlled study further demonstrates learning outcomes comparable to human SP training, with stronger early gains for novice learners and improved flexibility, psychological safety, and cost efficiency.

ACL 2026

Human or LLM as Standardized Patients? A Comparative Study in Medical Education

### Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

Message from the General Chair: 
*It is my great pleasure and honor to welcome you to the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025), held in beautiful Vienna, Austria, from July 27 to August 1, 2025. ACL2025continues our field’s 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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ACL 2025

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

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) 
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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 increasing context window greatly extends the capabilities of large language models, but on the other hand, it incurs an unaffordable memory overhead and computational latency due to the increasing Key-Value (KV) cache size. Recent KV cache compression methods manage to reduce the cache size by dropping irrelevant KVs. However, these methods often fail to identify crucial KVs for generation while excluding others accurately, resulting in severe information loss. To address this gap, we propose **IntentKV**, an intention-aware KV cache eviction method that identifies and retains crucial KVs according to the attention distribution of intention, which semantically reflects the user's goal and determines which part of the context is relevant. The consistency between the semantics and attention distribution is further substantiated through meticulously designed experiments. On this basis, IntentKV first distinguishes intention tokens from the vanilla context tokens based on their attention distribution distances. Then, the block-wise cumulative attention is calculated via aggregating the intention token attention. Finally, blocks that acquire high cumulative attention are picked and stored in KV cache. We evaluate our method across diverse long-context tasks and models. Results demonstrate that IntentKV can effectively maintain the model performance while reducing the KV cache size from 128K to 2K, leading to a 6.3x increase in decoding speed and 7.8x enhancement in memory efficiency compared to the default setting.

Question Tells You Where the Answer Is: Intention-aware Long-Context KV Cache Compression

Discrete Diffusion Language Models have emerged as a compelling paradigm for unified multimodal generation, yet their deployment is hindered by high inference latency arising from iterative decoding. Existing acceleration strategies often require expensive re-training or fail to leverage the 2D spatial redundancy inherent in visual data. To address this, we propose Locality-Aware Dynamic Rescue (LADR), a training-free method that expedites inference by exploiting the spatial Markov property of images. LADR prioritizes the recovery of tokens at the ``generation frontier'', regions spatially adjacent to observed pixels, thereby maximizing information gain. Specifically, our method integrates morphological neighbor identification to locate candidate tokens, employs a risk-bounded filtering mechanism to prevent error propagation, and utilizes manifold-consistent inverse scheduling to align the diffusion trajectory with the accelerated mask density. Extensive experiments on four text-to-image generation benchmarks demonstrate that our LADR achieves an approximate 4 $\times $ speedup over standard baselines. Remarkably, it maintains or even enhances generative fidelity, particularly in spatial reasoning tasks, offering a state-of-the-art trade-off between efficiency and quality.

LADR: Locality-Aware Dynamic Rescue for Efficient Text-to-Image Generation with Diffusion Large Language Models

Recent advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in interpreting single medical images. However, real-world clinical diagnosis is intrinsically a multi-view process, requiring the synthesis of information across volumetric slices, temporal sequences, and comparative modalities. Existing benchmarks fail to capture this complexity, limiting the assessment of models in realistic clinical workflows. To bridge this gap, we introduce MedMultiBench, the first large-scale benchmark specifically designed for medical multi-image understanding. Comprising 11,392 expert-curated samples, MedMultiBench evaluates MLLMs across four distinct dimensions: Joint Reasoning, Comparative Analysis, Comprehensive Perception, and In-Context Learning. We benchmark 13 state-of-the-art MLLMs, revealing that while current models excel in single-view tasks, they struggle significantly with multi-image contexts. Our experiments identify a performance degradation in open-source models when processing increased visual loads, whereas closed-source models demonstrate better scalability. MedMultiBench provides a robust framework to facilitate the development of MLLMs capable of holistic clinical reasoning.

Beyond Single View: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Medical Multimodal Large Language Models on Multi-Image Understanding

LLM-based Multi-agent systems (MAS) have shown strong capabilities across a wide range of domains. 
Their success largely hinges on the collaboration topology design, which has emerged as a central research focus in the automated MAS design.
However, existing approaches are fundamentally constrained by their reliance on homogeneous LLMs, which significantly limits overall system intelligence.
In response to this limitation, we for the first time propose the concept of **Automated Design of Heterogeneous-LLMs-based MAS (ADHM)**.
ADHM sheds light on a promising avenue for advancing collective intelligence, which focuses on the automated design of cost-effective MAS composed of diverse LLMs
and roles to suit various queries.
Toward this challenging goal, we propose **Hetero-Designer**, a novel pipeline that efficiently encodes intricate dependencies among queries, LLMs and roles through a novel Binary-Star Transformer and constructs Hetero-MAS in an autoregressive graph generation process. Extensive experiments demonstrate that **Hetero-Designer** is: (1) high-performing on various benchmarks, (2) economical in reducing overhead, (3) extensible to unseen LLMs and roles.

Hetero-Designer: Automated Design of Multi-Agent Systems with Heterogeneous LLMs

Financial numerical reasoning demands rigorous adherence to domain-specific logic and precise evidence foundation. However, large language models (LLMs) are prone to forced generation when confronting ambiguous evidence or complex recursive dependencies, often hallucinating values to bridge information gaps. To address this, we propose graph-bounded financial reasoning (GBFR), a neuro-symbolic framework that imposes semantic and structural constraints via a financial metric knowledge graph (FMKG). Unlike sequential generation paradigms, our approach employs a parallel graph-constrained reasoning algorithm that orchestrates specialized operators to simultaneously explore heterogeneous derivation paths of complex financial metrics. Through cross-path verification, the framework aggregates only semantically consistent results, ensuring reasoning is bounded by available context. Crucially, this approach enables safe abstention by distinguishing genuine data absence from retrieval failure, thereby preventing ungrounded fabrication. To evaluate this capability, we further construct counterfactual samples by perturbing entities, times, and metrics to synthesize unanswerable scenarios. Empirical evaluations on standard benchmarks demonstrate that GBFR significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.

Achieving Multi-Hop Calculation and Safe Abstention in Financial Numerical Reasoning by Metric Graph Constrained LLMs

Agentic workflows are commonly used to guide large language models in solving complex reasoning tasks. However, existing automated workflow generation methods primarily rely on stepwise local refinement or tree-based search over a single evolving workflow. Under limited optimization budgets, this paradigm constrains structural depth, hindering the discovery of workflows that require deep compositional structure. To address this limitation, we propose FusionFlow, a framework centered on workflow fusion. Unlike incremental refinement, fusion enables structural leaps by synthesizing multiple independently evolved workflows, allowing exploration of deeper regions of the workflow space within a finite budget. To make fusion effective, FusionFlow integrates local optimization, task-specific differentiation, and a dynamic scheduling mechanism. Experiments on six reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that FusionFlow consistently outperforms existing automated workflow generation methods. Further ablation and analysis confirm that fusion is the key driver of deep structural exploration, highlighting fusion-driven exploration as an effective approach for overcoming depth limitations in automated workflow generation.

FusionFlow: Enabling Deep Structural Exploration for Automated Agentic Workflow Generation

High-quality, large-scale audio captioning is crucial for advancing audio understanding, yet current automated methods often generate captions that lack fine-grained detail and contextual accuracy, primarily due to their reliance on limited unimodal or superficial multimodal information. Drawing inspiration from human auditory perception, which adeptly integrates cross-modal cues and performs sophisticated auditory scene analysis, we introduce a novel two-stage automated pipeline. This pipeline first employs specialized pretrained models to extract diverse contextual cues (e.g., speech, music, general sounds, and visual information from associated video). A large language model (LLM) then synthesizes these rich, multimodal inputs to generate detailed and context-aware audio captions. Key contributions of this work include: (1) the proposed scalable method for fine-grained audio caption generation; (2) FusionAudio, a new large-scale dataset comprising 1.2 million such detailed captions, combined with 6 million QA pairs; and (3) enhanced audio models developed using FusionAudio, specifically a CLAP-based audio encoder with superior audio-text alignment and instruction following. This paper paves the way for more nuanced and accurate automated understanding of complex audio environments.

Towards Fine-grained Audio Captioning with Multimodal Contextual Fusion

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate exceptional capability across diverse tasks. However, their deployment in long-context scenarios is hindered by two challenges: computational inefficiency and redundant information. We propose RAM (Read As HuMan), a context compression framework that adopts an adaptive hybrid reading strategy, to address these challenges. Inspired by human reading behavior (i.e., close reading important content while skimming less relevant content), RAM partitions the context into segments and encodes them with the input query in parallel. High-relevance segments are fully retained (close reading), while low-relevance ones are query-guided compressed into compact summary vectors (skimming). Both explicit textual segments and implicit summary vectors are concatenated and fed into decoder to achieve both superior performance and natural language format interpretability. To refine the decision boundary between close reading and skimming, we further introduce a contrastive learning objective based on positive and negative query–segment pairs. Experiments demonstrate that RAM outperforms existing baselines on multiple question answering and summarization benchmarks across two backbones, while delivering up to a 12x end-to-end speedup on long inputs (average length 16K; maximum length 32K).

Read As Human: Compressing Context via Parallelizable Close Reading and Skimming

Recent advances in generative AI have significantly enhanced the realism of multimodal media manipulation, thereby posing substantial challenges to manipulation detection. Existing manipulation detection and grounding approaches predominantly focus on manipulation type classification under result-oriented supervision, which not only lacks interpretability but also tends to overfit superficial artifacts. In this paper, we argue that generalizable detection requires incorporating explicit forensic reasoning, rather than merely classifying a limited set of manipulation types, which fails to generalize to unseen manipulation patterns. To this end, we propose **REFORM**, a reasoning-driven framework that shifts learning from outcome fitting to process modeling. REFORM adopts a three-stage curriculum that first induces forensic rationales, then aligns reasoning with final judgments, and finally refines logical consistency via reinforcement learning. To support this paradigm, we introduce **ROM**, a large-scale dataset with rich reasoning annotations. Extensive experiments show that REFORM establishes new state-of-the-art performance with superior generalization, achieving 81.52% ACC on ROM, 76.65% ACC on DGM4, and 74.9 F1 on MMFakeBench.

Cultivating Forensic Reasoning for Generalizable Multimodal Manipulation Detection

Visual hallucination remains a major obstacle to the reliability of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs). We argue that this issue originates from a fundamental statistical misspecification: the conventional softmax attention implicitly assumes i.i.d. noise, yet real LVLM attention patterns exhibit structured and competitive biases (e.g., attention sinks) that violate this assumption. To address this mismatch, we introduce Latent Attention Denoising (LAD), a principled and training-free framework that recasts attention calibration as a one-step score-based denoising process. LAD employs an interpretable energy function to derive an analytic score and applies a single Langevin-inspired update to actively steer corrupted attention logits toward more faithful configurations. This intervention imposes negligible computational overhead and operates at a speed comparable to standard greedy decoding. Extensive evaluations across diverse architectures confirm that LAD achieves superior performance on both generative and discriminative tasks, effectively mitigating hallucinations while maintaining efficiency comparable to standard decoding.

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