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Surprisal theory links human processing effort to the predictability of an upcoming linguistic unit, but empirical work often leaves the notion of a unit underspecified. In practice, experimental stimuli are segmented into linguistically motivated units (e.g., words), while pretrained language models assign probability mass to a fixed token alphabet that typically does not align with those units. As a result, surprisal-based predictors depend implicitly on ad hoc procedures that conflate two distinct modeling choices: the definition of the unit of analysis and the choice of regions of interest over which predictions are evaluated. In this paper, we disentangle these choices and give a unified framework for reasoning about surprisal over arbitrary unit inventories. We argue that surprisal-based analyses should make these choices explicit and treat tokenization as an implementation detail rather than a scientific primitive.

ACL 2026

On the Proper Treatment of Units in Surprisal Theory

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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.

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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.

Emergent communication (EmCom) with deep neural network-based agents promises to yield insights into the nature of human language, but remains focused primarily on a few subfield-specific goals and metrics that prioritize communication schemes which represent attributes with unique characters one-to-one and compose them syntactically. We thus reinterpret a common EmCom setting, the attribute-value reconstruction game, by imposing a small-vocabulary constraint to simulate double articulation, and formulating a novel setting analogous to naturalistic inflectional morphology (enabling meaningful comparison to natural language communication schemes). We develop new metrics and explore variations of this game motivated by real properties of inflectional morphology: concatenativity and fusion. Through our experiments, we discover that simulated phonological constraints encourage concatenative morphology, and emergent languages replicate the tendency of natural languages to fuse grammatical attributes.

Discovering Properties of Inflectional Morphology in Neural Emergent Communication

Social reasoning---inferring unobservable beliefs and intentions from partial observations of other agents---remains a challenging task for large language models (LLMs). We evaluate the limits of current reasoning language models in the social deduction game Avalon and find that while the largest models demonstrate strong performance, they require extensive test-time inference and degrade sharply when distilled to smaller, real-time-capable variants. To address this, we introduce a hybrid reasoning framework that externalizes belief inference to a structured probabilistic model, while using an LLM for language understanding and interaction. Our approach achieves competitive performance with much larger models in Agent-Agent play and, notably, is the first language agent to defeat human players in a controlled study---achieving a 67% win rate and receiving higher qualitative ratings than both reasoning baselines and human teammates. We release code, models, and a dataset to support future work on social reasoning in LLM agents.

Bayesian Social Deduction with Graph-Informed Language Models

Why do some languages like Czech permit free word order, while others like English do not? We address this question by pretraining transformer language models on a spectrum of synthetic word-order variants of natural languages. We observe that greater word-order irregularity consistently raises model surprisal, indicating reduced learnability. Sentence reversal, however, affects learnability only weakly. A coarse distinction of free- (e.g., Czech and Finnish) and fixed-word-order languages (e.g., English and French) does not explain cross-lingual variation. Instead, the structure of the word and subword vocabulary strongly predicts the model surprisal. Overall, vocabulary structure emerges as a key driver of computational word-order learnability across languages.

Vocabulary Shapes Cross-Lingual Variation of Word-Order Learnability in Language Models

When an AI assistant remembers that Sarah is a single mother working two jobs, does it interpret her stress differently than if she were a wealthy executive? As personalized AI systems increasingly incorporate long-term user memory, understanding how this memory shapes emotional reasoning is critical. We investigate how user memory affects emotional intelligence in large language models (LLMs) by evaluating 15 models on human validated emotional intelligence tests. We find that identical scenarios paired with different user profiles produce systematically divergent emotional interpretations. Across validated user-independent emotional scenarios and diverse user profiles, systematic biases emerged in several high-performing LLMs where advantaged profiles received more accurate emotional interpretations. Moreover, LLMs demonstrate significant disparities across demographic factors in emotion understanding and supportive recommendations tasks, indicating that personalization mechanisms can embed social hierarchies into models’ emotional reasoning. These results highlight a key challenge for memory-enhanced AI: systems designed for personalization may inadvertently reinforce social inequalities.

The Personalization Trap: How User Memory Alters Emotional Reasoning in LLMs

We propose VC-Inspector, a lightweight, open-source large multimodal model (LMM) for reference-free evaluation of video captions, with a focus on factual accuracy. Unlike existing metrics that suffer from limited context handling, weak factuality assessment, or reliance on proprietary services, VC-Inspector offers a reproducible, fact-aware alternative that aligns closely with human judgments. To enable robust training and interpretable evaluation, we introduce a systematic approach for generating captions with controllable errors, paired with graded quality scores and explanatory annotations. Experiments show that VC-Inspector achieves state-of-the-art correlation with human judgments, generalizing across diverse domains (e.g., VATEX-Eval, Flickr8K-Expert, and Flickr8K-CF benchmarks) and revealing the potential for caption improvement.

 VC-Inspector: Advancing Reference-free Evaluation of Video Captions with Factual Analysis

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in code translation, yet their performance deteriorates in low-resource programming domains such as Fortran and emerging frameworks like CUDA, where high-quality parallel data are scarce. We present an automated dataset generation pipeline featuring a dual-LLM Questioner–Solver design that incorporates external knowledge from compilers and runtime feedback. Beyond traditional source–target code pair datasets, our approach additionally generates (1) verified translations with unit tests for assessing functional consistency, and (2) multi-turn dialogues that capture the reasoning process behind translation refinement. Applied to Fortran→C++ and C++→CUDA, the pipeline yields 3.64k and 3.93k dialogues, respectively. Fine-tuning on this data yields dramatic improvements in functional correctness, boosting unit test success rates by over 56% on the challenging C++-to-CUDA task. We show that the generated data enables a 7B open-weight model to significantly outperform larger proprietary systems on key metrics like compilation success.

 Beyond Code Pairs: Dialogue-Based Data Generation for LLM Code Translation

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has become the backbone of knowledge-intensive multi-hop question answering, yet routing every sub-query through a frontier model turns every hop into a cost multiplier and makes real-world deployment prohibitively expensive. Existing remedies either fix the retrieval schedule, route once at the query level, or lack a principled stopping rule, leaving a critical gap: no framework adapts, hop by hop, to how a trajectory actually unfolds. We introduce RAG-on-a-Diet, a lightweight reinforcement-learning agent that treats each reasoning hop as an independent decision and selects the smallest model (Qwen3-4B, Qwen3-30B, or DS-R1-671B) sufficient for it, guided by entity- and confidence-aware features. Trained via behavior cloning followed by PPO under a five-component cost-aware reward (final, cumulative, step-wise, cost, balance) and coupled with an explicit two-tier termination policy (5-hop cap plus a tau=0.3 confidence gate), the agent carves a Pareto-optimal efficiency frontier. On HotpotQA it cuts Monetary Inference Cost by 60.07% against IRCoT with only a 3.7% F1 drop; it matches Adaptive-RAG's F1 at 37.30% lower cost; and it attains up to 2.33x higher Quality-per-Monetary-Cost. Consistent gains on MuSiQue, 2WikiMultiHopQA, CRAG, and Bamboogle confirm strong out-of-distribution robustness, setting a new paradigm for fine-grained resource control in multi-hop RAG.

 RAG-on-a-Diet: A Reinforcement Learning-Based Dynamic Resource Optimization Framework for RAG

To address the increasingly severe safety risk of large language models (LLMs), reasoning-based safety alignment methods have emerged. These methods overcome the limitations of 'shallow alignment' by exposing the model's Chain-of-Thought (CoT), enabling auditability of safety reasoning process through both training-phase supervision and post-generation verification. However, this transparency creates a critical vulnerability, a tension we define as the \textbf{Security Auditability Dilemma}: while explicit reasoning is a prerequisite for safety, its textual Auditable paradoxically transforms it into an optimization target for adaptive attackers and induces the model to unintentionally copy harmful content from its own reasoning context. To address this, we propose \textbf{Auditable Latent CoT Alignment (ALCA)}, a framework that decouples internal reasoning from external output. ALCA shifts the safety deliberation process into a continuous latent space. This allows the safety reasoning process to guide the generation of harmless outputs, while eliminates the discrete textual surface that facilitates internal copying and adaptive attack. Yet, this process is not a black box. we introduce a restricted \textbf{Self-Decoding} mechanism that allows the model to reconstruct its latent reasoning into human-readable text for supervision under specific guidance. Extensive experiments show that ALCA achieves robustness alignment, reducing the success rate of adaptive jailbreak attacks by over 40\% compared to strong baselines, while preserving performance. Our framework presents a path toward building LLMs that are both robustly secure and auditable.

Resolving the Security-Auditability Dilemma with Auditable Latent Chain-of-Thought Alignment

Audio-language pretraining (ALP) holds promise for learning general-purpose audio representation, yet remains underexplored. 
Crucially, there is no consensus on whether audio–language models can build effective general-purpose audio encoders, nor a systematic understanding of how pretraining objectives behave across diverse tasks and scales.
We identify three key barriers: limited scale of audio-text corpora, limited coverage of audio attributes in existing caption corpora, and lack of systematic exploration and evaluation.
To fill this gap, we present the first principled empirical study of ALP.
We first introduce CaptionStew, a 10.7M caption dataset aggregating open-source audio-text corpora across multiple domains and captioning focuses.
We then conduct the first comprehensive evaluation comparing contrastive and captioning objectives for learning audio representation across speech, music, and environmental sound tasks.
Our results not only demonstrate that ALP yields competitive, transferable representations, but reveal critical trade-offs: contrastive learning offers superior data efficiency, while captioning exhibits better scalability.
Furthermore, we find that the benefits of supervised initialization often diminish at larger scales, challenging common practices.
By grounding these claims in empirical evidence, we establish a viable pathway toward general-purpose audio representation learning, guiding future research.

 Revisiting Audio-language Pretraining for Learning General-purpose Audio Representation

Multimodal LLMs are increasingly deployed as perceptual backbones for autonomous agents in 3D environments, from robotics to virtual worlds. These applications require agents to perceive rapid state changes, attribute actions to the correct entities, and reason about concurrent multi-agent behaviors from a first-person perspective, capabilities that existing benchmarks do not adequately evaluate. We introduce GameplayQA, a framework for evaluating agentic-centric perception and reasoning through video understanding. Specifically, we densely annotate multiplayer 3D gameplay videos at 1.22 labels/second, with time-synced, concurrent captions of states, actions, and events structured around a triadic system of Self, Other Agents, and the World, a natural decomposition for multi-agent environments. From these annotations, we refined 2.4K diagnostic QA pairs organized into three levels of cognitive complexity, accompanied by a structured distractor taxonomy that enables fine-grained analysis of where models hallucinate. Evaluation of frontier MLLMs reveals a substantial gap from human performance, with common failures in temporal and cross-video grounding, agent-role attribution, and handling the decision density of the game. We hope GameplayQA stimulates future research at the intersection of embodied AI, agentic perception, and world modeling.

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