United States

Test-time reinforcement learning mitigates the reliance on annotated data by using majority voting results as pseudo-labels, emerging as a complementary direction to reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) for improving reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs). However, this voting strategy often induces confirmation bias and suffers from sparse rewards, limiting the overall performance. In this work, we propose subgroup-specific step-wise confidence-weighted pseudo-label estimation (SCOPE), a framework integrating model confidence and dynamic subgroup partitioning to address these issues. Specifically, SCOPE integrates the proposed step-wise confidence into pseudo-label estimation, prioritizing high-quality reasoning paths over simple frequency count. Furthermore, it dynamically partitions the candidate outputs pool into independent subgroups by balancing reasoning quality against exploration diversity. By deriving local consensus via repeat sampling for each subgroup, SCOPE provides diverse supervision targets to encourage broader exploration. We conduct experiments across various models and benchmarks, experimental results show that SCOPE consistently outperforms recent baselines. Notably, SCOPE achieves relative improvements of 13.1% on challenging AIME 2025 and 8.1% on AMC.

ACL 2026

 Beyond Majority Voting: Towards Fine-grained and More Reliable Reward Signal for Test-Time Reinforcement Learning

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>
<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>
<br><br><br><br>

To access this event page, you need to log in with the **email address you registered with**. <br>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.

poster

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enables large language models (LLMs) to incorporate external knowledge at inference. Graph-based RAG extends this by organizing corpora into knowledge graphs, improving multi-hop reasoning and offering a global understanding of the corpus. However, triplet-based graphs generated by LLMs are often fragmented and sparsely connected, which reduces coherence and hinders reasoning. Prior enrichment methods such as clustering, community detection, or approximate graph algorithms attempt to restore connectivity but incur high computational cost and risk semantic distortion. To address these issues, we propose TH-RAG, a hierarchical framework that organizes triplets into subtopics and topics, enhancing connectivity, integrating dispersed information, and supporting robust multi-hop reasoning. Experiments on abstractive and specific QA benchmarks show that TH-RAG outperforms strong baselines in accuracy and robustness while remaining efficient, providing a scalable foundation for graph-based RAG.

TH-RAG : Topic-Based Hierarchical Knowledge Graphs for Robust Multi-hop Reasoning in Graph-based RAG Systems

Despite rapid progress in building conversational AI agents, robustness is still largely untested. Small shifts in user behavior, such as being more impatient, incoherent, or skeptical, can cause sharp drops in agent performance, revealing how brittle current AI agents are. Today’s benchmarks fail to capture this fragility: agents may perform well under standard evaluations but degrade spectacularly in more realistic and varied settings. We address this robustness testing gap by introducing TraitBasis, a lightweight, model-agnostic method for systematically stress testing AI agents. TraitBasis learns directions in activation space corresponding to steerable user traits (e.g., impatience or incoherence), which can be controlled, scaled, composed, and applied at inference time without any fine-tuning or extra data. Using TraitBasis, we extend τ-Bench to τ-bench, where user behaviors are altered via controlled trait vectors. We observe an average 4%–20% performance degradation on τ-bench across frontier models, highlighting the lack of robustness of current AI agents to variations in user behavior. Together, these results highlight both the critical role of robustness testing and the promise of TraitBasis as a simple, data-efficient, and compositional tool. By powering simulation-driven stress tests and training loops, TraitBasis opens the door to building AI agents that remain reliable in the unpredictable dynamics of real-world human interactions. We plan to open-source τ-bench, across four domains: airline, retail, telecom, and telehealth, so the community can systematically QA their agents under realistic, behaviorally diverse intents and trait scenarios.

Impatient Users Confuse AI Agents: High-fidelity Simulations of Human Traits for Testing Agents

Multi-step retrosynthetic planning is a fundamental challenge in organic chemistry, traditionally modeled as a combinatorial search problem guided by single-step prediction models. However, this search-centric paradigm often disconnects from the explicit chemical reasoning processes employed by human experts. In this paper, we propose $R^3$ (Reinforced Reasoning Retrosynthesis), a novel framework that reformulates this task as end-to-end generative reasoning. Instead of traversing a search tree, $R^3$ simulates the problem-solving logic of chemists to directly generate complete synthetic pathways. To achieve this, we initialize the model with domain knowledge and employ end-to-end Reinforcement Learning (RL) to optimize the entire planning policy. Experimental results on Retrobench show that $R^3$ achieves a state-of-the-art Top-1 accuracy of 43.7%, demonstrating that generative reasoning offers a superior alternative to traditional search algorithms in solving complex retrosynthetic problems.

R3: End-to-End Reasoning-based Planning for Multi-step Retrosynthesis via Reinforcement Learning

The efficiency of multi-agent systems driven by large language models (LLMs) largely hinges on their communication topology. However, designing an optimal topology is a non-trivial challenge, as it requires balancing competing objectives such as task performance, communication cost, and robustness. Existing frameworks often rely on static or hand-crafted topologies, which inherently fail to adapt to diverse task requirements, leading to either excessive token consumption for simple problems or performance bottlenecks for complex ones. To address this challenge, we introduce a novel generative framework called \textit{Guided Topology Diffusion (GTD)}. Inspired by conditional discrete graph diffusion models, GTD formulates topology synthesis as an iterative construction process. At each step, the generation is steered by a lightweight proxy model that predicts multi-objective rewards (e.g., accuracy, utility, cost), enabling real-time, gradient-free optimization towards task-adaptive topologies. This iterative, guided synthesis process distinguishes GTD from single-step generative frameworks, enabling it to better navigate complex design trade-offs. We validated GTD across multiple benchmarks, and experiments show that this framework can generate highly task-adaptive, sparse, and efficient communication topologies, significantly outperforming existing methods in LLM agent collaboration. Our code is available at \url{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/diffusion_agent-953C}.

Dynamic Generation of Multi LLM Agents Communication Topologies with Graph Diffusion Models

Mathematical reasoning is one of the core capabilities for Large Language Models (LLMs). Yet, existing approaches often rely on static heuristics or pre-determined reasoning strategies, limiting their ability to adapt to different intermediate states. To address this limitation, we propose FLAIR (Fuzzy-Logic-AssIsted Reasoner), an adaptive framework that integrates fuzzy theory into LLM-based mathematical reasoning. Specifically, FLAIR characterizes intermediate problem-solving states using fuzzy memberships and employs a parameterized fuzzy rule system to conditionally activate subsequent actions. These rule parameters are further adjusted via Reinforcement Learning using solution-level feedback as the reward signal, enabling adaptive and iterative refinement without reliance on a fixed strategy. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to integrate fuzzy theory into LLM-based mathematical reasoning. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that FLAIR consistently outperforms recent state-of-the-art baselines, while offering effective and interpretable diagnostics of intermediate problem-solving states.

FLAIR: Steering LLM Mathematical Problem Solving based on A Fuzzy-Logic-AssIsted Reasoner

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) is a cornerstone for scaling LLMs, yet its training dynamics remain poorly understood, often leading to sub-optimal specialization. Moving beyond static routing, we present a systematic study of the MoE lifecycle using Helmholtz Free Energy}and Router Entropy. We identify a universal Three-Stage Phase Transition—Exploration, Symmetry Breaking, and Stabilization—marked by an Energy Climb and Plateau. This reflects Frustrated Exploration, caused by structural interference between specialization drives and uniformity constraints. To address this, we propose Uncertainty-Aware Routing (UAR), which aligns routing with the model’s epistemic state via: (1) Evidence-Triggered Expansion, increasing active experts for high-energy tokens, and (2) Epistemic Masking, applying load-balancing only in high-uncertainty regimes to shield mature experts. Experiments confirm UAR reduces perplexity and improves expert distinctiveness, offering a principled path toward thermodynamically aligned computation.

 Uncertainty-Aware Routing for Principled Alignment with MoE Dynamics

Large Language Models (LLMs) still struggle with multi-step logical reasoning. Existing approaches either purely refine the reasoning chain in natural language form or attach a symbolic solver as an external module. In this work, we instead ask whether LLMs contain a shared internal logical subspace that simultaneously aligns natural-language and symbolic-language views of the reasoning process. Our hypothesis is that this logical subspace captures logical reasoning capabilities in LLMs that are shared across views while remaining independent of surface forms. To verify this, we employ Canonical Correlation Analysis on the paired residual activations from natural-language and symbolic-language reasoning chains, learning a low-dimensional subspace with maximum cross-view correlation. Furthermore, we design a training-free approach that steers LLMs reasoning chain along this logical subspace, thereby leveraging the complementary reasoning signals from both views. Experiments on four logical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, improving accuracy by up to 11 percentage points and generalizing well on out-of-domain problems.

Discovering a Shared Logical Subspace: Steering LLM Logical Reasoning via Alignment of Natural-Language and Symbolic Views

Recent advances in Multimodal Large Reasoning Models (MLRMs) have enabled explicit chain-of-thought inference across vision and language, substantially improving performance on complex reasoning tasks. Despite these gains, the reasoning process introduces a subtle yet critical vulnerability. We identify an underexplored multimodal safety failure mode in which harmful objectives are embedded within ostensibly benign contexts, leading models to over-prioritize narrative coherence during reasoning. We term this phenomenon Safety Context Amnesia (SCA), wherein models correctly perceive risk-relevant visual cues but fail to enforce safety constraints as the reasoning process becomes dominated by contextual alignment. To mitigate SCA, we propose Intent-Guided Safety Reasoning (IGSR), an inference-time defense that operates without modifying target model parameters. IGSR employs a Perception Decoupler to extract objective visual evidence into a structured intent output, followed by a Cognitive Arbiter that enforces explicit safety constraints prior to generation. Extensive experiments across multiple multimodal safety benchmarks demonstrate that IGSR improves defense success rates by over 62% compared to baselines, while largely preserving task utility. These results highlight the critical role of structured, intent-aware reasoning in achieving robust safety reasoning for multimodal reasoning models.

Mitigating Safety Context Amnesia in Multimodal Reasoning Models via Intent-Guided Safety Reasoning

Complex reasoning problems often involve implicit spatial and geometric relationships that are not explicitly encoded in text. While recent reasoning models perform well across many domains, purely text-based reasoning struggles to capture structural constraints in complex settings. In this paper, we introduce FIGR, which integrates executable visual construction into multi-turn reasoning via end-to-end reinforcement learning. Rather than relying solely on textual chains of thought, FIGR externalizes intermediate hypotheses by generating executable code that constructs diagrams within the reasoning loop. An adaptive reward mechanism selectively regulates when visual construction is invoked, enabling more consistent reasoning over latent global properties that are difficult to infer from text alone. Experiments on seven challenging mathematical benchmarks demonstrate that FIGR outperforms strong text-only chain-of-thought baselines, improving the base model by 13.12% on AIME 2025 and 11.00% on BeyondAIME. These results highlight the effectiveness of precise, controllable figure construction of FIGR in enhancing complex reasoning ability.

Figure It Out: Improve the Frontier of Reasoning with Executable Visual States

Generative reward models (GRMs) have emerged as a promising approach for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences by offering greater representational capacity and flexibility than traditional scalar reward models. However, GRMs face two major challenges: reliance on costly human-annotated data restricts scalability, and self-training approaches often suffer from instability and vulnerability to reward hacking. To address these issues, we propose ConsistRM, a self-training framework that enables effective and stable GRM training without human annotations. ConsistRM incorporates the Consistency-Aware Answer Reward, which produces reliable pseudo-labels with temporal consistency, thereby providing more stable model optimization. Moreover, the Consistency-Aware Critique Reward is introduced to assess semantic consistency across multiple critiques and allocates fine-grained and differentiated rewards. Experiments on five benchmark datasets across four base models demonstrate that ConsistRM outperforms vanilla Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (RFT) by an average of 1.5%. Further analysis shows that ConsistRM enhances output consistency and mitigates position bias caused by input order, highlighting the effectiveness of consistency-aware rewards in improving GRMs.Our implementation is available at https://github.com/yuliangCarmelo/ConsistRM.

Downloads

Next from ACL 2026

TH-RAG : Topic-Based Hierarchical Knowledge Graphs for Robust Multi-hop Reasoning in Graph-based RAG Systems

Similar lecture

Deliberative Searcher: Improving LLM Reliability via Reinforcement Learning with Constraints