United States

As Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly operate as Deep Research (DR) Agents capable of autonomous investigation and information synthesis, reliable evaluation of their task performance has become a critical bottleneck. Current benchmarks predominantly rely on static datasets, which suffer from several limitations: limited task generality, temporal misalignment, and data contamination. To address these, we introduce DR-Arena, a fully automated evaluation framework that pushes DR agents to their capability limits through dynamic investigation. DR-Arena constructs real-time Information Trees from fresh web trends to ensure the evaluation rubric is synchronized with the live world state, and employs an automated Examiner to generate structured tasks testing two orthogonal capabilities: Deep reasoning and Wide coverage. DR-Arena further adopts Adaptive Evolvement Loop, a state-machine controller that dynamically escalates task complexity based on real-time performance, demanding deeper deduction or wider aggregation until a decisive capability boundary emerges. Experiments with six advanced DR agents demonstrate that DR-Arena achieves a Spearman correlation of 0.94 with the LMSYS Search Arena leaderboard. This represents state-of-the-art alignment with human preferences without any manual efforts, validating DR-Arena as a reliable alternative for costly human adjudication.

ACL 2026

DR-Arena: an Automated Evaluation Framework for Deep Research Agents

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.

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 AAAI 2026". Please be sure to check your spam email folder if you do not see an email confirmation right away.

Please log in

To access this event page, you are required to register.
Please complete your registration to continue.

We recommend reading [**the registration information**](https://aaai.org/conference/aaai/aaai-26/registration/) first.

**Online Registration Form**: https://aaai.getregistered.net/conference-2026 

Registration Required

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.

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.

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

Deep search agents that combine large language models with retrieval tools excel at complex, multi-hop queries. Yet, existing benchmarks such as BrowseComp rely on black-box web search APIs, facing key limitations. (1) Fairness: for agents, dynamic and opaque web APIs hinder reproducibility and fair comparisons across agents. (2) Disentanglement: for retrieval, the lack of a fixed document corpus makes it impossible to isolate retriever contributions from end-to-end search agent accuracy. We introduce BrowseComp-Plus, a benchmark derived from BrowseComp that employs a fixed, human-verified corpus, enabling controlled retrieval for deep search agents. BrowseComp-Plus clearly distinguishes agent performance: with a BM25 retriever, the open-source Search-R1 achieves 3.86% accuracy, while GPT-5 achieves 55.9%. Additionally, BrowseComp-Plus makes retrieval gains explicit: pairing GPT-5 with Qwen3-Embedding-8B retriever further improves accuracy to 70.1% while reducing search calls. Overall, BrowseComp-Plus provides a fair and disentangled testbed, advancing both deep search agent evaluation and retrieval research for agentic search. Code and data can be found at: https://texttron.github.io/BrowseComp-Plus/

BrowseComp-Plus: A Fair and Disentangled Evaluation Benchmark for Deep Search Agents

Decoder-only large language models (LLMs) have been increasingly adopted to build embedding models for diverse tasks. To overcome the inherent limitations of causal attention in representation learning, many existing methods modify the attention mechanism to be bidirectional, potentially undermining LLMs' ability to extract semantic information acquired during pre-training. Meanwhile, leading unidirectional approaches often rely on extra input text to generate contextualized embeddings, inevitably increasing computational costs. In this work, we propose Causal2Vec, a general-purpose embedding model tailored to enhance the performance of decoder-only LLMs without altering their original architectures or introducing significant computational overhead. Specifically, we first employ a lightweight BERT-style model to pre-encode the input text into a single Contextual token, which is then prepended to the LLM's input sequence, allowing each token to capture contextualized information even without attending to future tokens. Furthermore, to mitigate the recency bias introduced by last-token pooling, we concatenate the last hidden states of Contextual and EOS tokens as the final text embedding. In practice, Causal2Vec achieves a new state-of-the-art performance on the MTEB benchmark among models trained solely on publicly available retrieval datasets.

Causal2Vec: Improving Decoder-only LLMs as Embedding Models through a Contextual Token

Large Language Models (LLMs) have greatly advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP), particularly through instruction tuning, which enables broad task generalization without additional fine-tuning. However, their reliance on large-scale datasets—often collected from human or web sources—makes them vulnerable to backdoor attacks, where adversaries poison a small subset of data to implant hidden behaviors. Despite this growing risk, defenses for instruction-tuned models remain underexplored. We propose MB-Defense (Merging \& Breaking Defense Framework), a novel training pipeline that immunizes instruction-tuned LLMs against diverse backdoor threats. MB-Defense comprises two stages: (i) Defensive Poisoning, which merges attacker and defensive triggers into a unified backdoor representation, and (ii) Backdoor Neutralization, which breaks this representation through additional training to restore clean behavior. Extensive experiments across multiple LLMs show that MB-Defense substantially lowers attack success rates while preserving instruction-following ability. Our method offers a generalizable and data-efficient defense strategy, improving the robustness of instruction-tuned LLMs against unseen backdoor attacks.

Merging Triggers, Breaking Backdoors: Defensive Poisoning for Instruction-Tuned Language Models

Understanding research papers remains challenging for foundation models due to specialized scientific discourse and complex figures and tables, yet existing benchmarks offer limited fine-grained evaluation at scale. To address this gap, we introduce RPC-Bench, a large-scale question-answering benchmark built from review–rebuttal exchanges of high-quality computer science papers, containing 15K human-verified QA pairs. We design a fine-grained taxonomy aligned with the scientific research flow to assess models’ ability to understand and answer why, what, and how questions in scholarly contexts. We also define an elaborate LLM–human interaction annotation framework to support large-scale labeling and quality control. Following the LLM-as-a-Judge paradigm, we develop a scalable framework that evaluates models on correctness-completeness and conciseness, with high agreement to human judgment. Experiments reveal that even the strongest models (GPT-5) achieve only 68.2% correctness-completeness, dropping to 37.46% after conciseness adjustment, highlighting substantial gaps in precise academic paper understanding.

RPC-Bench: A Fine-grained Benchmark for Research Paper Comprehension

Anomaly detection aims at distinguishing between \textit{in-distribution} samples, which belong to the same distribution as the training set, and \textit{out-of-distribution} samples, which lie outside of it. In textual anomaly detection, recent approaches routinely apply anomaly detection algorithms directly to embeddings extracted from pre-trained embedding models (\textit{two-stage approaches}). However, the geometric properties of pre-trained embeddings can hinder the effectiveness of detection algorithms, which often rely on distance-based measures. In this work, we first highlight the relevance of similarity-trained models for textual anomaly detection. Beyond being trained to capture semantic similarities, these models also exhibit geometric properties that appear better suited to detection algorithms. We further demonstrate that, besides model choice, a simple post-processing step can significantly improve anomaly detection by adapting embeddings to the assumptions made by classical detection algorithms. The bulk of our experiments is done on a reformulation of the classification tasks from the MTEB benchmark into anomaly detection tasks.

Enhancing Two Steps Textual Anomaly Detection through Anisotropy Mitigation

Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) of large language models often suffers from task interference and catastrophic forgetting. Recent approaches alleviate this issue by isolating task-critical parameters during training. However, these methods represent a static solution to a dynamic problem, assuming that parameter importance remains fixed once identified. In this work, we empirically demonstrate that parameter importance exhibits temporal drift over the course of training. To address this, we propose Evolving Parameter Isolation (EPI), a fine-tuning framework that adapts isolation decisions based on online estimates of parameter importance. Instead of freezing a fixed subset of parameters, EPI periodically updates isolation masks using gradient-based signals, enabling the model to protect emerging task-critical parameters while releasing outdated ones to recover plasticity. Experiments on diverse multi-task benchmarks demonstrate that EPI consistently reduces interference and forgetting compared to static isolation and standard fine-tuning, while improving overall generalization. Our analysis highlights the necessity of synchronizing isolation mechanisms with the evolving dynamics of learning diverse abilities.

Parameter Importance is Not Static: Evolving Parameter Isolation for Supervised Fine-Tuning

Spatial language understanding is fundamental to tasks from robot navigation to document analysis, yet current work exhibits biases toward English and prepositional marking. We present a multilingual framework and benchmark decomposing spatial relations into surface elements (figure, ground, predicate, markers) and semantic components (dynamicity, stasis). Evaluating frontier LLMs on Spanish, Basque, and Chinese with text-only input, we find high accuracy on figure and ground identification but persistent gaps in two areas: semantic classification of topological and projective relations, and surface identification of morphological spatial markers—Basque case affixes proving most challenging at as low as 15.3\%. These results suggest that surface parsing does not entail spatial understanding, and that evaluation must include typologically diverse spatial marking strategies.

Where the Cat Sat: A Multilingual Framework for Spatial Language Understanding

Personalizing large language models (LLMs) to individual users requires incorporating extensive interaction histories and profiles, but input token constraints make this impractical due to high inference latency and API costs. Existing approaches rely on heuristic methods such as selecting recent interactions or prompting summarization models to compress user profiles. However, these methods treat context as a monolithic whole and fail to consider how LLMs internally process and prioritize different profile components. We investigate whether LLMs' attention patterns can effectively identify important personalization signals for intelligent context compression. Through preliminary studies on representative personalization tasks, we discover that (a) LLMs' attention patterns naturally reveal important signals, and (b) fine-tuning enhances LLMs' ability to distinguish between relevant and irrelevant information. Based on these insights, we propose \textbf{Attn-GS}, an attention-guided context compression framework that leverages attention feedback from a marking model to mark important personalization sentences, then guides a compression model to generate task-relevant, high-quality compressed user contexts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Attn-GS significantly outperforms various baselines across different tasks, token limits, and settings, achieving performance close to using full context while reducing token usage by 50 times.

Attn-GS: Attention-Guided Context Compression for Efficient Personalized LLMs

Large language models (LLMs) conventionally represent text as sequences of discrete tokens, making long-context scaling largely a matter of processing more tokens more efficiently.
We instead explore a complementary direction: increasing how much original context each token represents.
To this end, we introduce Glyph, a framework that renders long texts into compact visual pages and processes them with a vision-language model (VLM), allowing a fixed context window to cover substantially more text.
To make visual compression practical, Glyph combines continual pre-training on rendered long-text data, an LLM-driven genetic search to identify rendering configurations that balance compression and task performance, and post-training with supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning.
Across multiple long-context benchmarks, Glyph achieves 3–4× token compression while maintaining performance comparable to strong text-only LLMs such as Qwen3-8B, with over 4× faster prefilling and decoding and 2× faster supervised fine-tuning.
Under more aggressive compression, a VLM with a 128K context window can handle tasks that would otherwise require up to 1M input tokens.
Our code and model are released at https://github.com/thu-coai/Glyph.

Glyph: Scaling Context Windows via Visual-Text Compression

The evaluation of societal biases in NLP models is critically hindered by a geo-cultural gap, This leaves regions such as Latin America severely underserved, making it impossible to adequately assess or mitigate the perpetuation of harmful regional stereotypes in language technologies. This paper presents LACES, a stereotype association dataset, for 15 Latin American countries. This dataset includes 4,789 stereotype associations manually created and annotated by 83 participants. The dataset was developed through targeted community partnerships across Latin America. Additionally, in this paper, we propose a novel adaptive data collection methodology that uniquely integrates the sourcing of new stereotype entries and the validation of existing data within a single, unified workflow. This approach results in a resource with more unique stereotypes than previous static collection methods, enabling a more efficient stereotype collection. The paper further supports the quality of LACES by demonstrating reduced efficacy of debiasing methods on this dataset in comparison to existing popular stereotype benchmarks.

Downloads

Next from ACL 2026

BrowseComp-Plus: A Fair and Disentangled Evaluation Benchmark for Deep Search Agents

Similar lecture

Towards Zero-Shot Diabetic Retinopathy Grading: Learning Generalized Knowledge via Prompt-Driven Matching and Emulating