United States

Knowledge Bases (KBs) play a key role in various applications. As two representative KB-related tasks, knowledge base completion (KBC) and knowledge base question answering (KBQA) are closely related and inherently complementary with each other. Thus, it will be beneficial to solve the task of joint KBC and KBQA to make them reinforce each other. However, existing studies usually rely on the small language model (SLM) to enhance them jointly, and the large language model (LLM)&#39;s strong reasoning ability is ignored. In this paper, by combining the strengths of the LLM with the SLM, we propose a novel framework JCQL, which can make these two tasks enhance each other in an iterative manner. To make KBC enhance KBQA, we augment the LLM agent-based KBQA model&#39;s reasoning paths by incorporating an SLM-trained KBC model as an action of the agent, alleviating the LLM&#39;s hallucination and high computational costs issue in KBQA. To make KBQA enhance KBC, we incrementally fine-tune the KBC model by leveraging KBQA&#39;s reasoning paths as its supplementary training data, improving the ability of the SLM in KBC. Extensive experiments over two public benchmark data sets demonstrate that JCQL surpasses all baselines for both KBC and KBQA tasks.

ACL 2026

Joint Knowledge Base Completion and Question Answering by Combining Large Language Models and Small Language Models

## Welcome to EMNLP 2022!
I am delighted to welcome you to EMNLP 2022! I believe this conference has been complicated beyond any precedent. Over the past year, it’s been thrilling to see the organization team approach each new puzzle with creativity and enthusiasm. We hope that those participating in Abu Dhabi as well as those joining remotely will leave the conference feeling newly inspired by the program and newly connected to our ever-growing community. Following EMNLP 2021 and major NLP conferences since, EMNLP 2022 is “hybrid,” serving both virtual and in-person participants.

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EMNLP 2022 will take place in Abu Dhabi from December 7th to December 11th, 2022. And it will be held in hybrid mode, both online and offline.

Knowledge Bases (KBs) play a key role in various applications. As two representative KB-related tasks, knowledge base completion (KBC) and knowledge base question answering (KBQA) are closely related and inherently complementary with each other. Thus, it will be beneficial to solve the task of joint KBC and KBQA to make them reinforce each other. However, existing studies usually rely on the small language model (SLM) to enhance them jointly, and the large language model (LLM)'s strong reasoning ability is ignored. In this paper, by combining the strengths of the LLM with the SLM, we propose a novel framework JCQL, which can make these two tasks enhance each other in an iterative manner. To make KBC enhance KBQA, we augment the LLM agent-based KBQA model's reasoning paths by incorporating an SLM-trained KBC model as an action of the agent, alleviating the LLM's hallucination and high computational costs issue in KBQA. To make KBQA enhance KBC, we incrementally fine-tune the KBC model by leveraging KBQA's reasoning paths as its supplementary training data, improving the ability of the SLM in KBC. Extensive experiments over two public benchmark data sets demonstrate that JCQL surpasses all baselines for both KBC and KBQA tasks.

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. 
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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.

Infographics are composite visual artifacts that combine data visualizations with textual and illustrative elements to communicate information. While recent text-to-image (T2I) models can generate aesthetically appealing images, their reliability in generating infographics remains unclear. Generated infographics may appear correct at first glance but contain easily overlooked issues, such as distorted data encoding or incorrect textual content. We present IGenBench, the first benchmark for evaluating the reliability of text-to-infographic generation, comprising 600 curated test cases spanning 30 infographic types. We design an automated evaluation framework that decomposes reliability verification into atomic yes/no questions based on a taxonomy of 10 question types. We employ multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to verify each question, yielding question-level accuracy (Q-ACC) and infographic-level accuracy (I-ACC). We comprehensively evaluate 10 state-of-the-art T2I models on IGenBench. Our systematic analysis reveals key insights for future model development: (i) a three-tier performance hierarchy with the top model achieving Q-ACC of 0.90 but I-ACC of only 0.49; (ii) data-related dimensions emerging as universal bottlenecks (e.g., Data Completeness: 0.21); and (iii) the challenge of achieving end-to-end correctness across all models.

IGenBench: Benchmarking the Reliability of Text-to-Infographic Generation

Function calling empowers large language models (LLMs) to interface with external tools, yet existing RL-based approaches suffer from misalignment between reasoning processes and tool-call decisions. We propose R2IF, a reasoning-aware RL framework for interpretable function calling, adopting a composite reward integrating format/correctness constraints, Chain-of-Thought Effectiveness Reward (CER), and Specification-Modification-Value (SMV) reward, optimized via GRPO. Experiments on BFCL/ACEBench show R2IF outperforms baselines by up to 34.62% (Llama3.2-3B on BFCL) with positive Average CoT Effectiveness (0.05 for Llama3.2-3B), enhancing both function-calling accuracy and interpretability for reliable tool-augmented LLM deployment.

R2IF: Aligning Reasoning with Decisions via Composite Rewards for Interpretable LLM Function Calling

The ability to model sparse and underspecified rewards, characteristic of human preferences, is fundamental to scaling Reinforcement Learning (RL). Current preference-based reward modeling largely relies on verifiable rewards, where human-annotated labels define rule-based signals. However, these methods face a fundamental bottleneck we term the Matryoshka Doll Problem: a recursive dependency where each reward verifier requires a meta-verifier, leading to continuous and costly dependence on human annotation. In this work, we propose Dual RM, which couples discriminative and generative reward models (DisRMs and GenRMs) under a non-parametric meta-reward. Rather than verifying the correctness of GenRM’s reasoning, the meta-reward evaluates its practical impact on response quality. Specifically, GenRM identifies multi-dimensional evaluation rubrics and iteratively refines the response, while DisRM quantifies the quality shifts induced by each rubric. Furthermore, we implement rubric-based test-time scaling to improve sample efficiency and preference alignment under both DPO and GRPO. Our experiments demonstrate that Dual RM achieves strong performance across major preference benchmarks. Notably, even when trained exclusively on language modality, it exhibits robust cross-modal transfer on Omni-RewardBench.

DUAL RM: Beyond Rule-based Preference Reward Modeling via Meta-Reward

The widespread deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) has spurred significant progress in the detection of LLM-generated text. However, existing detection methods often rely on statistical features that are insufficient for reliable detection; for example, even though LLM-generated and human-written texts exhibit different probability distributions in surrogate models, they can produce nearly identical entropy values, thereby conflating the two types of text. In this paper, we propose that modulating the decoding temperature and monitoring how the probability distributions respond can better probe the intrinsic discrepancies between two types of text. Building upon this insight, we introduce a new feature termed Temperature Sensitivity (TS) and demonstrate that LLM-generated text tends to exhibit higher TS than human-written text. Finally, we propose NTS, a novel and simple zero-shot detector built upon normalized temperature sensitivity. Extensive experiments across three datasets, multiple domains, and various source models demonstrate the superior effectiveness and robustness of our proposed approach. Code avaliable at: https://github.com/Shixuan-Ma/NTS.

Zero-Shot Detection of LLM-Generated Text using Temperature Sensitivity

The effective detection and governance of Large Language Model (LLM) generated content has become increasingly critical due to the growing risk of misuse. Despite the impressive performance of existing detectors, their reliability and potential in multilingual, real-world scenarios remain largely underexplored.
In this study, we introduce DetectRL-X, a comprehensive multilingual benchmark designed to evaluate advanced detectors across 8 dimensions. The benchmark encompasses 8 languages commonly used in commercial contexts and collects human-written texts from 6 domains highly susceptible to LLM misuse. To better aligned with real-world applications, We create LLM-generated texts using 4 popular commercial LLMs, and include typical AI-assisted writing operations such as polishing, expanding, and condensing to capture authentic usage patterns. Furthermore, we develop a multilingual framework for paraphrasing and perturbation attacks to simulate diverse human modifications and writing noise, enabling stress testing of detectors across languages.
Experimental results on DetectRL-X reveal the strengths and limitations of current state-of-the-art detectors when applied to diverse linguistic resources. We further analyze how domains, generators, attack strategies, text length, and refinement operations influence performance in different languages, underscoring DetectRL-X as an effective benchmark for strengthening multilingual and language-specific detectors.

DetectRL-X: Towards Reliable Multilingual and Real-World LLM-Generated Text Detection

The quadratic complexity and indefinitely growing key-value (KV) cache of standard Transformers pose a major barrier to long-context processing. To overcome this, we introduce the **Co**llaborative **Me**mory **T**ransformer (CoMeT), a novel architecture that enables LLMs to handle arbitrarily long sequences with constant memory usage and linear time complexity. Designed as an efficient, plug-in module, CoMeT can be integrated into pre-trained models with only minimal fine-tuning. It operates on sequential data chunks, using a dual-memory system to manage context: a temporary memory on a FIFO queue for recent events, and a global memory with a gated update rule for long-range dependencies. These memories then act as a dynamic soft prompt for the next chunk. The effectiveness of our approach is remarkable: a model equipped with CoMeT and fine-tuned on 32k contexts can accurately retrieve a passkey from any position within a 1M token sequence. On the SCROLLS benchmark, CoMeT surpasses other efficient methods and achieves performance comparable to a full-attention baseline on summarization tasks. Its practical effectiveness is further validated on real-world agent and user behavior QA tasks, supported by a novel layer-level pipeline parallel training strategy that enables fine-tuning on extremely long contexts. The code is available at: https://github.com/LivingFutureLab/Comet

CoMeT: Collaborative Memory Transformer for Efficient Long Context Modeling

Reasoning Language Models (RLMs) have significantly improved performance on complex tasks by extending the reasoning chain. However, these chains are prone to containing factual errors, particularly in knowledge-intensive tasks. To address this issue, we propose **CheckRLM**, a framework that improves the reliability of the reasoning process through Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) by timely checking and correcting factual errors. Specifically, CheckRLM extracts factual claims from the reasoning chain to identify and localize subtle knowledge inconsistencies during inference. Upon detection of errors, a refinement mechanism performs minimal-cost yet precise corrections by leveraging external knowledge, ensuring coherence between the reasoning chain and correct knowledge. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CheckRLM substantially outperforms existing baselines, exhibiting a strong capability to mitigate error accumulation in long-horizon reasoning with lower costs. The code and data are available at https://github.com/AI9Stars/CheckRLM.

CheckRLM: Effective Knowledge–Thought Coherence Checking in Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in reasoning and generation, serving as the foundation for advanced persona simulation and Role-Playing Language Agents (RPLAs). However, achieving authentic alignment with human cognitive and behavioral patterns remains a critical challenge for these agents. 
We present HumanLLM, a framework treating psychological patterns as interacting causal forces.
We construct 244 patterns from $\sim$12,000 academic papers and synthesize 11,359 scenarios where 2-5 patterns reinforce, conflict, or modulate each other, with multi-turn conversations expressing inner thoughts, actions, and dialogue.
Our dual-level checklists evaluate both individual pattern fidelity and emergent multi-pattern dynamics, achieving strong human alignment ($r=0.90$) while revealing that holistic metrics conflate simulation accuracy with social desirability.
HumanLLM-8B outperforms Qwen3-32B on multi-pattern dynamics despite 4$\times$ fewer parameters, demonstrating that authentic anthropomorphism requires cognitive modeling---simulating not just what humans do, but the psychological processes generating those behaviors.
Our dataset, code, and model are available at:https://github.com/YJGoodbye2024/HumanLLM

HumanLLM: Benchmarking and Improving LLM Anthropomorphism via Human Cognitive Patterns

Object hallucination critically undermines the reliability of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), often stemming from a fundamental failure in cognitive introspection—where models blindly trust linguistic priors over specific visual evidence. Existing mitigations remain limited: contrastive decoding approaches operate superficially without rectifying internal semantic misalignments, while current latent steering methods rely on static vectors that lack instance-specific precision. We introduce Vision-Language Introspection (VLI), a training-free inference framework that simulates a metacognitive self-correction process. VLI first performs Attributive Introspection to diagnose hallucination risks via probabilistic conflict detection and localize the causal visual anchors. It then employs Interpretable Bi-Causal Steering to actively modulate the inference process, dynamically isolating visual evidence from background noise while neutralizing blind confidence through adaptive calibration. VLI achieves state-of-the-art performance on advanced models, reducing object hallucination rates by 12.67% on MMHal-Bench and improving accuracy by 5.8% on POPE.

Vision-Language Introspection: Mitigating Overconfident Hallucinations in MLLMs via Interpretable Bi-Causal Steering

Emotion Recognition in Conversation (ERC), the task of identifying the emotion of each utterance in a conversation, is crucial for human-machine interaction. Existing LLM-based ERC methods focus on standard prompting and slow thinking for emotion analysis. However, they suffer from the lack of human-like emotion reasoning and discrimination between similar emotions, thus limiting accurate emotion predictions. To this end, we present JoPR, jointing perception-curriculum learning and emotional reasoning for conversational emotion recognition. Specifically, we devise a multi-dimension curriculum with long CoT fine-tuning to clone human-like emotion reasoning. We further design an emotion-specific reward function in a novel reinforcement learning framework, thereby enhancing the discernment between similar emotions. Our proposal is extensively evaluated over three widely used benchmark datasets, and experimental results confirm the superiority of JoPR. Furthermore, we provide an in-depth analysis to confirm the emotion perception and reasoning capabilities of JoPR.

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IGenBench: Benchmarking the Reliability of Text-to-Infographic Generation

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