United States

Despite achieving high accuracy on medical benchmarks, LLMs exhibit the Einstellung Effect in clinical diagnosis—relying on statistical shortcuts rather than patient-specific evidence, causing misdiagnosis in atypical cases. Existing benchmarks fail to detect this critical failure mode. We introduce MedEinst, a counterfactual benchmark with 5,383 paired clinical cases across 49 diseases. Each pair contains a control case and a &quot;trap&quot; case with altered discriminative evidence that flips the diagnosis. We measure susceptibility via Bias Trap Rate—probability of misdiagnosing traps despite correctly diagnosing controls. Evaluation shows frontier models achieve high baseline accuracy but severe bias trap rates. Thus, we propose ECR-Agent, aligning LLM reasoning with Evidence-Based Medicine via two components: (1) Dynamic Causal Inference (DCI) performs structured reasoning through dual-pathway perception, dynamic causal graph reasoning across three levels (association, intervention, counterfactual), and evidence audit for final diagnosis; (2) Critic-Driven Graph &amp; Memory Evolution (CGME) iteratively refines the system by storing validated reasoning paths in an exemplar base and consolidating disease-specific knowledge into evolving illness graphs. Source code is to be released.

ACL 2026

MedEinst: Benchmarking the Einstellung Effect in Medical LLMs through Counterfactual Differential Diagnosis

We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-26 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.

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 AAAI 2026". Please be sure to check your spam email folder if you do not see an email confirmation right away.

Please log in

To access this event page, you are required to register.
Please complete your registration to continue.

We recommend reading [**the registration information**](https://aaai.org/conference/aaai/aaai-26/registration/) first.

**Online Registration Form**: https://aaai.getregistered.net/conference-2026 

Registration Required

AAAI 2026

We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

Despite achieving high accuracy on medical benchmarks, LLMs exhibit the Einstellung Effect in clinical diagnosis—relying on statistical shortcuts rather than patient-specific evidence, causing misdiagnosis in atypical cases. Existing benchmarks fail to detect this critical failure mode. We introduce MedEinst, a counterfactual benchmark with 5,383 paired clinical cases across 49 diseases. Each pair contains a control case and a "trap" case with altered discriminative evidence that flips the diagnosis. We measure susceptibility via Bias Trap Rate—probability of misdiagnosing traps despite correctly diagnosing controls. Evaluation shows frontier models achieve high baseline accuracy but severe bias trap rates. Thus, we propose ECR-Agent, aligning LLM reasoning with Evidence-Based Medicine via two components: (1) Dynamic Causal Inference (DCI) performs structured reasoning through dual-pathway perception, dynamic causal graph reasoning across three levels (association, intervention, counterfactual), and evidence audit for final diagnosis; (2) Critic-Driven Graph & Memory Evolution (CGME) iteratively refines the system by storing validated reasoning paths in an exemplar base and consolidating disease-specific knowledge into evolving illness graphs. Source code is to be released.

poster

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.

The 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026) will take place in San Diego, California, from July 2 - 7, 2026.

Post-training hybridization of large language models (LLMs) often replaces quadratic self-attention with sliding-window attention (SWA) to reduce KV cache usage and improve latency. Existing hybridization schemes are typically defined either at the layer level (e.g., interleaving) or at the head level via static rankings from local to global. Layer-level schemes ignore that local and global dependencies are routed through heads within the same layer, while static head-level rankings suffer from entanglement: a head’s local/global behavior can change after hybridization. We propose BOSCH, Black-box Binary Optimization for Short-context Head Selection, a training-free method that formulates the problem as a Large Neighborhood Search and decomposes it into three subproblems: (i) layer-importance detection via small-budget black-box probes, (ii) adaptive per-layer SWA-ratio assignment based on these sensitivities, and (iii) grouped head-level optimization within ratio buckets. Extensive experiments on 4 LLMs ranging from 1.7B to 30B parameters, across 4 SWA ratios, show that BOSCH consistently outperforms layer-level heuristics and 6 strong static head-level methods, with larger gains at higher SWA ratios. Under continual pretraining, BOSCH recover original long-context performance faster and to a higher level. Analysis of the selected heads reveals substantial turnover for BOSCH across different SWA ratios, underscoring the importance of performing head-level selection for each target ratio rather than relying on fixed locality rankings.

 BOSCH: Black-Box Binary Optimization for Short-Context Attention-Head Selection in LLMs

Iconicity, the resemblance between linguistic form and meaning, is pervasive in sign languages, offering a natural testbed for visual grounding in vision–language models (VLMs). We introduce the Visual Iconicity Challenge, a video-based benchmark that adapts psycholinguistic measures to evaluate VLMs on three tasks: (i) phonological sign-form prediction, (ii) transparency (inferring meaning from visual form), and (iii) graded iconicity ratings. We assess 17 state-of-the-art VLMs in zero- and few-shot settings on Sign Language of the Netherlands and compare them to human baselines. VLMs mirror human phonological difficulty patterns (e.g., handshape harder than location) and achieve moderate to strong alignment with human iconicity ratings. However, they still fail to infer lexical meaning from visual form alone and show a systematic object-based bias that inverts the human preference for action-based signs. Crucially, models with stronger phonological form prediction correlate better with human iconicity judgments, indicating shared sensitivity to visually grounded structure. Our findings validate these diagnostic tasks, show that explicit reasoning narrows the open-to-closed-model calibration gap, and motivate human-centric signals for modelling iconicity in multimodal models.

The Visual Iconicity Challenge: Evaluating Vision-Language Models on Sign Language Form–Meaning Mapping

Can generative agents be trusted in multimodal environments? Despite recent advances, agents remain limited in their ability to reason about safety, coherence, and trust across modalities. We introduce a reproducible simulation framework to evaluate generative agents in three aspects: (1) safety improvement over time via iterative plan revision in multimodal scenarios; (2) detection of unsafe activities across social contexts; and (3) social dynamics, measured through interaction and acceptance rates. These multimodal agents are evaluated using metrics that quantify plan revisions and unsafe-to-safe conversions. Experiments show that while agents detect direct multimodal contradictions, they often fail to align local revisions with global safety, achieving only a 55% success rate in correcting unsafe plans. We release a dataset of 1,000 multimodal plans, yielding more than 600,000 simulation steps. Notably, 45% of unsafe actions are accepted when paired with misleading visual cues, revealing a strong tendency to overtrust visual content. Code is available at https://github.com/AdonaiVera/X-CASE

Multimodal Safety Evaluation in Generative Agent Social Simulations

Behavior trees provide a transparent and modular structure for encoding expert-designed policies, enabling interpretable decision-making in complex tasks. Yet, applying behavior trees to high-dimensional perceptual inputs such as images or language is challenging as defining symbolic predicates over raw perceptual data is non-trivial. While state-of-the-art large multimodal models (such as vision-language models) can overcome this issue by utilizing natural language queries over perceptual inputs, they incur high computational cost, making them unsuitable for many applications. Imitation learning offers a way to distill these expert models into compact models, though it requires extensive supervision. In contrast, reinforcement learning reduces the need for costly supervision but risks misalignment of condition nodes with their intended semantics as well as poor credit assignment. To address these challenges, we introduce CERL (Condition-node Expert-regularized Reinforcement Learning), a framework that leverages expert-regularized reinforcement learning to preserve semantic faithfulness, while employing a factorized policy that aggregates sequential condition-node decisions into a single decision unit to alleviate credit assignment challenges. Experiments across seven tasks from the GymCards, FrozenLake, and BabyAIText suites demonstrate that our framework outperforms pure imitation learning or reinforcement learning baselines, retains strong agreement with expert decisions, and achieves substantial gains in inference speed and model size over expert models. Our implementation is available in https://github.com/HyosikMoon/CERL.

Lightweight and Faithful Visual Condition Checking in Behavior Trees via Expert-Regularized Reinforcement Learning

When answering subjective questions, an ideal LLM should surface diverse plausible perspectives rather than favoring a single viewpoint, a characteristic known as pluralism. Recent studies show that modern LLMs optimized through preference alignment systematically favor certain positions on subjective queries, making pluralism evaluation increasingly important. However, existing evaluation methods focus dominantly on multiple-choice and question-answering tasks, leaving open-ended generation largely unaddressed.

We propose PLURALEVAL, an evaluation framework that assesses LLM pluralism in open-ended generation by comparing outputs against free-form crowd responses. Our approach decomposes ground-truth responses into atomic, non-overlapping claims, then evaluates whether LLMs adequately cover this diverse claim space. We then introduce WildSCOPE, a multi-domain dataset of natural crowd responses, and demonstrate that PLURALEVAL captures novel insights, such as the collapse of pluralism through sycophancy, where LLM systematically degrades in overton pluralism when a user's belief is revealed. Finally, we discuss the value and actionable insights for preserving and encouraging pluralism from LLM deployers' side.

Evaluating Language Model Pluralism through In-the-wild Crowd Discussions

A central goal for mechanistic interpretability has been to identify the right units of analysis in large language models (LLMs) that causally explain their outputs. While early work focused on individual neurons, evidence that neurons often encode multiple concepts has motivated a shift toward analyzing directions in activation space. A key question is how to find directions that capture interpretable features in an unsupervised manner. Current methods rely on dictionary learning with sparse autoencoders (SAEs), commonly trained over residual stream activations to learn directions from scratch. However, SAEs often struggle in causal evaluations and lack intrinsic interpretability, as their learning is not explicitly tied to the computations of the model. Here, we tackle these limitations by directly decomposing MLP activations with semi-nonnegative matrix factorization (SNMF), such that the learned features are (a) sparse linear combinations of co-activated neurons, and (b) mapped to their activating inputs, making them directly interpretable. Experiments on Llama 3.1, Gemma 2 and GPT-2 show that SNMF derived features outperform SAEs and a strong supervised baseline (difference-in-means) on causal steering, while aligning with human-interpretable concepts. Further analysis reveals that specific neuron combinations are reused across semantically-related features, exposing a hierarchical structure in the MLP's activation space. Together, these results position SNMF as a simple and effective tool for identifying interpretable features and dissecting concept representations in LLMs.

Constructing Interpretable Features from Compositional Neuron Groups

Multimodal Mathematical Reasoning (MMR) has recently attracted increasing attention for its capability to solve mathematical problems involving both textual and visual modalities. However, current models still face significant challenges in real-world visual math tasks, often misinterpreting diagrams, failing to align mathematical symbols with visual evidence, or producing inconsistent reasoning steps. Moreover, existing evaluations mainly focus on checking final answers rather than verifying the correctness or executability of each intermediate step. A growing body of recent research addresses these issues by integrating structured perception, explicit alignment, and verifiable reasoning within unified frameworks.
To establish a clear roadmap for understanding and comparing different MMR approaches, we systematically review them around four fundamental questions: (1) What to extract from multimodal inputs, (2) How to represent and align textual and visual information, (3) How to perform the reasoning, and (4) How to evaluate the correctness of the overall reasoning process. Finally, we discuss open challenges and share our thoughts on future research directions.

A Survey of Multimodal Mathematical Reasoning: From Perception, Alignment to Reasoning

The large language models offer a scaleable solution for the generation of synthetic data faced with a trade-off between maintaining the diversity of generation and achieving factually accurate results. This paper introduces Graphsynth, a framework which leverages a probabilistic factor graph modeling the universe of attributes. The framework leverages a high-level schema mapping compiled into efficient hard masks during the decoding phase for maintaining the syntactic truth and a span-synchronized verifier for dismissing logical contradictions at the decode time. The experiments conducted on biomedical, legal, and generic domains show that the method outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines with a structural integrity approaching perfection, a coverage of around 94% attributes on the factor graph solution, and a boost in performance on downstream tasks such as +17.9% on TruthfulQA.

GraphSynth: Resolving the Diversity-Reliability Trade-off with Probabilistic Factor Graphs

To close the gap between LLM-based agents and humans in planning and reasoning, agents need large-scale, diverse environments for continuous learning---yet building such environments is itself prohibitively expensive. We present C-World, an environment creation system that enables users to build agent environments on demand. We define a complete agent environment through four components: an Action Space of 5,571 format-unified tools across 204 common applications, a Task Distribution engine that synthesizes long-horizon workflows with wild constraints, a Transition Function implemented as a state controller that injects realistic failures and perturbations, and a Reward Signal combining verifiable metrics with LLM-based judgment. C-World operates in two modes: a realistic mode grounded in live API execution, and a synthesized mode powered by the World Engine, which approximates tool behavior without live service access, enabling scalable environment creation---including environments for domains and tools that do not yet exist in the real world. Evaluation of nine state-of-the-art LLMs reveals that planning ability is uniformly strong but execution remains the bottleneck, and that constraint following---not tool invocation---is the dominant failure mode. The World Engine achieves Spearman $\rho = 0.883$ ranking correlation with real execution, and fine-tuning on just 1,170 C-World trajectories outperforms baselines trained on 119k samples, demonstrating C-World's dual value as a rigorous evaluation environment and a scalable data engine. Our code and data are available at https://ziqiao-git.github.io/C-World/.

C-World: A Computer Use Agent Environment Creator

This study investigates how different moral conditions influence the general problem-solving capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). We aim to explore whether the role of morality as a cognitive function operating in human decision-making can be extended to LLMs. Specifically, we define distinct moral stages based on Kohlberg’s theory of moral development and design prompts to elicit model responses aligned with each corresponding condition. The validity of this alignment is verified using the Defining Issues Test, a human evaluation tool. Subsequently, models reflecting the characteristics of each condition are evaluated using the MMLU benchmark, which requires general problem-solving abilities across various domains. Experimental results show that different moral perspectives lead to changes in the model’s decision-making during general reasoning, reflected in both responses and internal representations. Notably, conditions grounded in more advanced moral stages tend to elicit more thoughtful and reflective problem-solving behavior, which is often associated with enhanced performance. Our study attempts to broaden the concept of LLM morality, which has traditionally only been considered in ethical judgment scenarios. Furthermore, it emphasizes that morality is not merely a means of ensuring safety but a crucial factor that shapes a model's behavior and thought processes.

Downloads

Next from ACL 2026

BOSCH: Black-Box Binary Optimization for Short-Context Attention-Head Selection in LLMs

Similar lecture

CounterBench: Evaluating and Improving Counterfactual Reasoning in Large Language Models