United States

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.

ACL 2026

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

### Welcome!
The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. Our Virtual Poster Sessions will take place online Thursday, August 22, 2024.

You are required to register for this event. **Please register [here](https://2024.aclweb.org/registration). **

If you have already registered, please check your inbox for an email from Underline granting you access to ACL 2024 content.

Please register!

ACL 2024

The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. More information will be announced soon.

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.

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.

ArgGenBench: Benchmarking the Complex Controlled Argument Generation Capability of Large Language Models

Cultural taboo safety is essential for deploying large language models (LLMs), as culturally insensitive outputs may cause offense or even social harm. However, existing cultural benchmarks primarily assess cultural knowledge or values biases, while overlooking whether LLMs can recognize and respect cultural taboos, especially when taboos are implicitly hidden in seemingly harmless questions. Besides, cultural taboos are implicit, and context-dependent, thus poss unique challenges for reliable evaluation. To address these gaps, we introduce **CulShield**, the first public benchmark dedicated to evaluating and improving the cultural taboo safety of LLMs. CulShield spans 77 countries and regions, and includes over 2,020 taboos. It evaluates models along both explicit knowledge and implicit behaviors.Experiments on several advanced LLMs (e.g., GPT-4o-mini, Gemini-2.5-pro) reveal a clear "knowledge-behavior gap": models often fail to apply known taboos during interaction. We further show that variations in linguistic context can significantly affect LLMs' cultural taboo safety. Code and data is accessible here: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/CulShield-7A0E.

The “Knowledge–Behavior Gap” in Cultural Taboo Safety of Large Language Models

The path to fully autonomous web agents is currently hindered by a critical bottleneck: their limited ability to handle CAPTCHA. Existing agent benchmarks largely ignore this practical challenge, failing to evaluate an agent's real-world capacity to solve CAPTCHA. To bridge this gap, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of real-world CAPTCHA distributions and introduce MirrorCAPTCHA, a benchmark annotated with Weighted Pass Rate and a newly proposed metric Completion Degree. MirrorCAPTCHA is designed to serve as a ``mirror'' that faithfully reflects the automation capabilities of agents in real scenarios. We filter $2095$ websites from Common Crawl, identify the CAPTCHA deployed on these sites, and cluster them into $18$ distinct categories using K-means algorithm. To ensure practicality, we extract a web subgraph from Common Crawl covering these websites and use random walks to simulate real-world CAPTCHA encounter frequencies, yielding a realistic measure of agents’ ability. Additionally, we develop a lightweight synthetic data pipeline to train Ovis2-Agent-CAPTCHA-8B, which significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art closed-source models on MirrorCAPTCHA, achieving a $9.4\%$ higher average Weighted Pass Rate and a $2.13\%$ higher average Completion Degree than the runner-up, Gemini-2.5-Pro.

MirrorCAPTCHA: Wild CAPTCHA, Wild Distribution, Wild Web-based Platform Meet Multimodal LLM Agents

Large Language Model (LLM) agents are reshaping the industrial landscape. However, most practical agents remain human-designed because tasks differ widely, making them labor-intensive to build. This situation poses a central question: \emph{can we automatically create and adapt domain agents in the wild?} While several recent approaches have sought to automate agent creation, they typically treat agent generation as a black‑box procedure and rely solely on final performance metrics to guide the process. Such strategies overlook critical evidence explaining why an agent succeeds or fails, and often require high computational costs. To address these limitations, we propose \textit{ReCreate}, an experience‑driven framework for the automatic creation of domain agents. ReCreate systematically leverages agent interaction histories, which provide rich concrete signals on both the causes of success or failure and the avenues for improvement. Specifically, we introduce an \textit{agent‑as‑optimizer} paradigm that effectively learns from experience via three key components: (i) an experience storage and retrieval mechanism for on-demand inspection; (ii) a reasoning–creating synergy pipeline that map execution experience into scaffold edits; and (iii) hierarchical updates that abstract instance-level details into reusable domain patterns. In experiments across diverse domains, ReCreate consistently outperforms human-designed agents and existing automated agent generation methods, even when starting from minimal seed scaffolds.

ReCreate: Reasoning and Creating Domain Agents Driven by Experience

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) serves as a cornerstone technique for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, its training is often plagued by \emph{entropy collapse}, a rapid decline in policy entropy that limits exploration and undermines training effectiveness. While recent works attempt to mitigate this issue via several heuristic entropy interventions, the underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. In this work, we conduct comprehensive theoretical and empirical analyses of entropy dynamics in RLVR, offering two main insights: (1) We derive a tight approximation for token-level entropy change at each update step, revealing four governing factors and providing a unified theoretical framework of how existing methods influence entropy; (2) We reveal a fundamental limitation of recent approaches: they rely on heuristic adjustments to one or two of these factors, leaving other relevant factors unconsidered, thus inherently limiting their effectiveness. Motivated by these findings, we propose STEER, a principled entropy-modulation method that adaptively reweighs tokens based on theoretically-estimated entropy variations. Extensive experiments across six mathematical reasoning and three coding benchmarks demonstrate that STEER effectively mitigates entropy collapse and consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.

Rethinking Entropy Interventions in RLVR: An Entropy Change Perspective

Ensuring fairness in social survey simulation is critical, as biased outputs can misrepresent underrepresented groups. This issue is growing as large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for this task. However, standard fine-tuning based on Empirical Risk Minimization (ERM) often under-optimizes minority groups, causing substantial subgroup disparities. Distributionally robust Optimization (DRO) methods reduce worst-case errors, but their strict worst-case selection can lead to noisy and unstable optimization under demographic sparsity. These issues create intertwined challenges for fairness, convergence and stability. We propose SAFO, a dynamic utility–fairness optimization framework for LLM-based survey simulation that explicitly targets both fairness and training stability. SAFO combines (i) an Optimizer that preserves mean-loss utility, (ii) an Adversary that performs temperature-controlled, EMA-smoothed and loss-driven group reweighting, and (iii) a Nash-inspired Regulator that adaptively adjusts the utility–fairness trade-off by tracking weak-group gains and collateral utility damages. Experiments on three large-scale survey datasets from China, the U.S., and Europe show that SAFO consistently improves minority performance and social-welfare metrics. It reduces worst-group gaps by up to 12.7%, maintains overall accuracy with a mean change of less than 0.3% and lowers variance across random seeds. Our code is available at https://github.com/PiLab-ZJU/SAFO.

Downloads

Next from ACL 2026

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

Similar lecture

Legal Case Retrieval: A Survey of the State of the Art

.css-70qvj9{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;}Downloads

Next from ACL 2026

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

Similar lecture

Legal Case Retrieval: A Survey of the State of the Art

Downloads