United States

Multi-agent systems (MAS) built on large language models promise improved problem-solving through collaboration, yet they often fail to consistently outperform strong single-agent baselines due to error propagation at inter-agent message handoffs. In this work, we conduct a systematic empirical analysis of such failures and introduce an edge-level error taxonomy that identifies four dominant error types: Data Gap, Signal Corruption, Referential Drift, and Capability Gap, as primary sources of failure in multi-agent interactions. Building on this taxonomy, we propose AgentAsk, a lightweight clarification module designed to intervene at the edge level in MAS to prevent cascading errors. The module operates by strategically applying minimal clarifications at critical points within the system, improving the accuracy and efficiency of the overall task. AgentAsk is trained to balance the trade-offs between clarification cost, latency, and accuracy, while it is also architecture-agnostic and can be easily integrated into existing systems. Evaluated across five benchmarks, AgentAsk consistently improves accuracy by up to 4.69%, while keeping latency and extra costs below 10% compared to baseline MAS, showcasing its high efficiency and minimal overhead. The code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/AgentAsk-3432.

ACL 2026

AgentAsk: Multi-Agent Systems Need to Ask

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. <br>
[Full Message from General Chair Philipp Koehn](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QiJFOmMjvDgsDo3i1XzlQnImxe3RU_Cy/view?usp=sharing) <br><br><br>
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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.

technical paper

Embodied agents have successfully leveraged large language models (LLMs) to better transform human instructions and images into executable task plans. Furthermore, memories of agents can be leveraged to achieve continual self-learning and optimization. However, vector data quality problems emerge in memories when they are projected into vector space, especially in discerning contextually similar but semantically conflicting sentences and highly similar images. This is particularly detrimental to embodied AI as it potentially distorts the robot’s actions. To address this challenge, we propose Conflict Detection Rules (CDRs) to identify and manage data quality issues in vector knowledge bases, which assist in correcting the index structure and further improving the answer quality. Experimental results show that planners with CDRs exceed the basic LLM planner by 15.25% and 14.25% in grammatical accuracy (GA) and interpretation accuracy (IA) on average, respectively. Moreover, the entire workflow has been successfully integrated into various scenarios, demonstrating its practical applicability and robustness in the real world.

Conflict-Aware Memory for Embodied Agents: Enhancing Vector Data Quality via Detection Rules

Multimodal Large Language Models typically assume linguistic context invariably enhances visual understanding. We study this assumption in semantic adversarial scenarios, specifically magic tricks, where narration deliberately diverges from physical reality. We introduce MagicBench, a diagnostic benchmark of 402 videos for evaluating MLLMs under hierarchical linguistic interference, together with a Physical Constraint Set (PCS) protocol for assessing adherence to physical laws. Evaluation uncovers a Semantic Dependency Paradox: (1) Semantic anchoring: Entity nouns act as anchors aiding localization, paradoxically boosting performance despite false predicates. (2) Visual Agency Loss: In semantic vacuums, multimodal performance collapses 12.4% (p < 0.01) below the vision-only "capability probe". This gap persists under symmetric prompting, suggesting a form of functional perception suppression in which autonomous visual search may be under-utilized in multimodal settings without linguistic triggers. Causal interventions via spatial prompting and signal magnification provide evidence that internal reasoning remains functional, supporting the interpretation of a perceptual access bottleneck. Our findings suggest MLLMs function as "language-guided passive observers", advocating for perceptually-independent architectures that decouple sensory agency from linguistic dominance. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/Ink-Dawn/MagicBench

MagicBench: Diagnosing Visual Agency Loss and Semantic Dependency in Multimodal LLMs

The rapid advance of automatic survey generation (ASG) has created a critical evaluation challenge. Existing evaluation methods suffer from both cognitive dimensional simplification and methodological unreliability, primarily due to the over-reliance on the ''LLM-as-a-Judge'' approach. To bridge this gap, we establish Bloom-Eval, a six-tiered benchmark based on Bloom's Taxonomy that reliably evaluates ASG systems by prioritizing deterministic algorithms and introducing our GRADE approach for abstract abilities. Furthermore, we construct a large-scale, cross-disciplinary dataset of over 3,000 high-quality papers. Our empirical study on this benchmark reveals that while leading ASG systems are proficient format organizers, they remain unqualified knowledge integrators. This work aims to redefine ASG evaluation standards, shifting the research focus from the formal mimicry of surface structure to the cognitive deepening of intellectual content. Our method provides the ASG field with a systematic, reproducible, and theoretically grounded benchmark to guide future research.

Bloom-Eval: A Hierarchical Evaluation Benchmark for Automatic Survey Generation Based on Bloom's Taxonomy

Temporal Knowledge Graph Question Answering (TKGQA) aims to answer temporal questions using knowledge from Temporal Knowledge Graphs (TKGs).
Existing LLM-based TKGQA methods typically utilize RAG-based or Agent-based paradigms, yet both struggle to construct reliable temporal evidence chains. 
RAG-based approaches primarily rely on semantic retrieval to fetch question-relevant contexts but overlook the structural dependencies within TKGs, leading to broken evidence chains, whereas iterative agents are prone to error propagation during multi-step reasoning.
To address these limitations, we propose TECQA, a framework designed to construct temporal evidence chains for LLM reasoning. 
Firstly, TECQA employs structure-guided subgraph retrieval to capture structural dependencies and intermediate reasoning paths. 
Subsequently, it utilizes a k-nearest temporal neighbor pruning strategy to filter irrelevant noise while strictly preserving the continuous local history surrounding critical events. 
Finally, the retained temporal neighbors are serialized by temporal proximity to explicitly reconstruct a coherent temporal evidence chain. Extensive experiments on MultiTQ and CronQuestions demonstrate that TECQA achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming strong baselines by 45.3\% particularly on complex queries. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/SimonsLiu/TECQA}.

Temporal Evidence Chain for Temporal Knowledge Graph Question Answering with Large Language Models

The semantic gap between colloquial user queries and professional legal documents presents a fundamental challenge in Legal Case Retrieval (LCR). Existing dense retrieval methods typically treat LCR as a black-box semantic matching process, neglecting the explicit juridical logic that underpins legal relevance. To address this, we propose GLIER (Generative Legal Inference and Evidence Ranking), a framework that reformulates retrieval as an inference process over latent legal variables. GLIER decomposes the task into two interpretability-driven stages: (1) A Joint Generative Inference module that translates raw queries into latent legal indicators (Charges and Legal Elements), employing a unified sequence-to-sequence strategy where charges and elements are generated jointly to enforce logical consistency; and (2) A Multi-View Evidence Fusion mechanism that aggregates generative confidence with structural and lexical signals for precise ranking. Extensive experiments on LeCaRD and LeCaRDv2 demonstrate that GLIER outperforms strong baselines like SAILER and KELLER. Notably, our framework exhibits exceptional data efficiency, maintaining robust performance even when trained with only 10% of the data.

GLIER: Generative Legal Inference and Evidence Ranking for Legal Case Retrieval

Large Vision–Language Models (LVLMs) have shown strong potential as multilingual Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents, as evidenced by existing GUI benchmarks. However, these benchmarks exhibit two primary limitations: (1) although Perception and Reasoning (P&R) capabilities are fundamental for GUI agents, current benchmarks lack fine-grained diagnostics to identify which specific capabilities lead to task failures, hindering targeted improvements; (2) existing benchmarks fail to provide a strictly aligned cross-lingual evaluation environment, introducing confounding factors that prevent isolating the language impact on GUI agent performance. To address these issues, we propose the Multilingual P&R GUI Benchmark (MPR-GUI-Bench), featuring strictly aligned environments across six languages and eight fine-grained P&R tasks. Our benchmark reveals consistent P&R gaps between English and non-English settings, particularly on reasoning-intensive tasks. To leverage the superior English P&R capabilities for bridging cross-lingual gaps, we identify layers sensitive to language and propose GUI-XLI, a GUI Cross-Lingual Intervention method that aligns non-English hidden states with their English counterparts at these layers during inference. Experiments show that GUI-XLI effectively reduces the cross-lingual gaps, with an average gain of 6.5% in non-English settings.

MPR-GUI: Benchmarking and Enhancing Multilingual Perception and Reasoning in GUI Agents

Label-free reinforcement learning enables large language models to improve reasoning capabilities without ground-truth supervision, typically by treating majority-voted answers as pseudo-labels. However, we identify a critical failure mode: as training maximizes self-consistency, output diversity collapses, causing the model to confidently reinforce systematic errors that evade detection. We term this the consensus trap. To escape it, we propose CoVerRL, a framework where a single model alternates between generator and verifier roles, with each capability bootstrapping the other. Majority voting provides noisy but informative supervision for training the verifier, while the improving verifier progressively filters self-consistent errors from pseudo-labels. This co-evolution creates a virtuous cycle that maintains high reward accuracy throughout training. Experiments across Qwen and Llama model families demonstrate that CoVerRL outperforms label-free baselines by 4.7-5.9\% on mathematical reasoning benchmarks. Moreover, self-verification accuracy improves from around 55\% to over 85\%, confirming that both capabilities genuinely co-evolve.

CoVerRL: Breaking the Consensus Trap in Label-Free Reasoning via Generator-Verifier Co-Evolution

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have increasingly assisted in historical tasks such as text processing, their capacity for professional-level historical reasoning remains underexplored. Existing benchmarks primarily assess basic knowledge breadth or lexical understanding, failing to capture the higher-order skills—such as evidentiary reasoning—that are central to historical research. To fill this gap, we introduce ProHist-Bench, a novel benchmark anchored in the Chinese Imperial Examination (Keju) system—a comprehensive microcosm of East Asian political, social, and intellectual history spanning over 1,300 years. Developed through deep interdisciplinary collaboration, ProHist-Bench features 400 challenging, expert-curated questions across eight dynasties, accompanied by 10,891 fine-grained evaluation rubrics. Through a rigorous evaluation of 18 LLMs, we reveal a significant proficiency gap: even state-of-the-art LLMs struggle with complex historical research questions. We hope ProHist-Bench will facilitate the development of domain-specific reasoning LLMs, advance computational historical research, and further uncover the untapped potential of LLMs. We release ProHist-Bench at https://github.com/inclusionAI/ABench/tree/main/ProHist-Bench.

Can LLMs Act as Historians? Evaluating Historical Research Capabilities of LLMs via the Chinese Imperial Examination

Tabular data is widely used in fields such as finance and healthcare. Traditional tree-based models are prevalent for tabular prediction tasks due to their ability to handle heterogeneous features. However, their heavy reliance on feature engineering limits both their generalizability and their human-readable interpretability. On the other hand, Large Language Models (LLMs) naturally provide intermediate reasoning steps, thus offering greater transparency in decision-making. Nevertheless, LLMs often fail to match the predictive performance of tree-based models on tabular data. To address these challenges, we propose a novel Logic-Graph-Enhanced LLM Reasoning (LogGER) framework that integrates the strengths of tree-based models and LLMs. Specifically, we reformulate the traditional decision tree as a human-readable logic graph, which explicitly models the causal relationships between features and targets. This logic graph is automatically constructed using LLMs based on data priors and serves as the foundation for LogGER. To fully leverage the logic graph, we further introduce a logic-graph-guided process supervision approach, which evaluates and enhances the quality of LLM’s intermediate reasoning steps using logic-graph-aided process reward. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LogGER consistently outperforms both tree-based models and state-of-the-art LLM methods on a variety of tabular prediction tasks, achieving superior accuracy and interpretability.

Towards Interpretable Tabular Reasoning: Enhancing LLM Reasoning on Tabular Data with Pre-Constructed Logic Graph

Argument generation is a fundamental NLP task that aims to automatically produce persuasive arguments.
Effective human argumentation is inherently complex and multifaceted, integrating argumentative strategies, appropriate styles, and adaptation to target audiences, etc.
However, existing studies focus on limited control signals such as topic, stance, or key aspects, failing to capture this complexity.
As LLMs advance, the lack of benchmarks evaluating multifaceted argumentative control becomes a critical bottleneck.
To address this, we introduce ArgGenBench, a novel benchmark containing complex instructions that integrate multi-dimensional control, including topic, stance, length, style, strategy, audience, and key points.
Extensive evaluation across 15 LLMs reveals significant limitations: even the best-performing model achieves only 42.7\% win rate against human-verified references.
These results highlight the challenge of controlled argument generation and establish ArgGenBench as a rigorous testbed for developing more capable systems.

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