United States

As large language models continue to advance, ensuring their trustworthiness is critical. However, inaccessible real-world ground truth labels pose a significant challenge in high-stakes domains. Recent studies have highlighted weak-to-strong generalization, where a strong model trained only on a weak model&#39;s labels surpasses the weak model in task performance. Yet, whether critical trustworthiness properties such as robustness, fairness, and privacy can generalize similarly remains an open question. This is the first work to study this question by examining if a stronger model can enhance trustworthiness when fine-tuned on a weaker model’s labels, a paradigm we term weak-to-strong trustworthiness. To address this, we introduce two fundamental fine-tuning strategies that leverage trustworthiness regularization during the fine-tuning of the weak model and the weak-to-strong transfer. Our experimental evaluation on real-world datasets reveals that while some trustworthiness properties, such as fairness, adversarial robustness, and OOD robustness, show significant improvement in trustworthiness generalization when both models were regularized, others, like privacy, do not exhibit signs of weak-to-strong trustworthiness. Our results highlight the potential of weak-to-strong trustworthiness as a practical pathway for enhancing the trustworthiness of increasingly capable AI systems, even under imperfect real-world conditions.

ACL 2026

Generalizing Trust: Weak-to-Strong Trustworthiness in Language Models

We are pleased to announce the Thirty-Eighth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-24), which will be held in Vancouver, British Columbia at the Vancouver Convention Centre – West Building from 20-27 February, 2024.

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-24 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.

We expect for AAAI-24 to be an in-person conference – one author of all accepted papers will be expected to present work in person unless there are exceptional circumstances that prevent this.

In order to access the AAAI-24 event page you need to register [here](https://aaai.org/aaai-conference/registration/)

AAAI 2024

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. 

As large language models continue to advance, ensuring their trustworthiness is critical. However, inaccessible real-world ground truth labels pose a significant challenge in high-stakes domains. Recent studies have highlighted weak-to-strong generalization, where a strong model trained only on a weak model's labels surpasses the weak model in task performance. Yet, whether critical trustworthiness properties such as robustness, fairness, and privacy can generalize similarly remains an open question. This is the first work to study this question by examining if a stronger model can enhance trustworthiness when fine-tuned on a weaker model’s labels, a paradigm we term weak-to-strong trustworthiness. To address this, we introduce two fundamental fine-tuning strategies that leverage trustworthiness regularization during the fine-tuning of the weak model and the weak-to-strong transfer. Our experimental evaluation on real-world datasets reveals that while some trustworthiness properties, such as fairness, adversarial robustness, and OOD robustness, show significant improvement in trustworthiness generalization when both models were regularized, others, like privacy, do not exhibit signs of weak-to-strong trustworthiness. Our results highlight the potential of weak-to-strong trustworthiness as a practical pathway for enhancing the trustworthiness of increasingly capable AI systems, even under imperfect real-world conditions.

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.

Sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models have achieved remarkable scalability, yet they remain vulnerable to hallucinations, particularly when processing long-tail knowledge. We identify that this fragility stems from static Top-k routing: routers tend to favor high-frequency patterns over rare factual associations. Consequently, "specialist experts" possessing critical long-tail knowledge are often assigned low gating scores and remain "dormant"—under-prioritized for specific tokens despite their proven causal importance on other inputs. To address this, we propose Counterfactual Routing (CoR), a training-free inference framework designed to awaken these dormant experts. CoR integrates layer-wise perturbation analysis with the Counterfactual Expert Impact (CEI) metric to dynamically shift computational resources from syntax-dominant to knowledge-intensive layers while maintaining a constant total activation count, effectively retrieving causally decisive experts via virtual ablation. Extensive experiments on TruthfulQA, FACTOR, and TriviaQA demonstrate that CoR improves factual accuracy by 3.1% on average without increasing the inference budget, establishing a superior Pareto frontier compared to static scaling strategies.

Awakening Dormant Experts:Counterfactual Routing to Mitigate MoE Hallucinations

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) with long chain-of-thought reasoning have recently achieved remarkable success. Yet, equipping domain-specialized models with such reasoning capabilities, referred to as "Reasoning + X", remains a significant challenge. While model merging offers a promising training-free solution, existing methods often suffer from a destructive performance collapse: existing methods tend to both weaken reasoning depth and compromise domain-specific utility. Interestingly, we identify a counter-intuitive phenomenon underlying this failure: \textit{reasoning ability predominantly resides in parameter regions with low gradient sensitivity, contrary to the common assumption that domain capabilities correspond to high-magnitude parameters}. Motivated by this insight, we propose \textbf{ReasonAny}, a novel merging framework that resolves the {reasoning–domain performance collapse} through Contrastive Gradient Identification. Experiments across safety, biomedicine, and finance domains show that ReasonAny effectively synthesizes "Reasoning + X" capabilities, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art baselines while retaining robust reasoning performance.

ReasonAny: Incorporating Reasoning Capability to Any Model via Simple and Effective Model Merging

Despite significant advances in LLM-driven GUI agents, the field remains constrained by the challenge of reconciling high-fidelity realism with verifiable evaluation accuracy. To address this, we introduce NaturalGAIA, a verifiable evaluation dataset grounded in real-world human GUI interaction intents. By decoupling logical causal pathways from linguistic narratives, it rigorously simulates natural human intent, characterized by cognitive non-linearity and contextual dependencies. Furthermore, we propose LightManus-Jarvis, a hierarchical collaborative framework where LightManus manages dynamic topological planning and context evolution, while Jarvis ensures execution precision via hybrid visual-structural perception. Experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves a Weighted Pathway Success Rate of 45.6%, significantly outperforming the state-of-the-art baseline (21.1%), while reducing token consumption by 75% and execution time by 76%. These results validate the efficacy of the macro-planning and micro-execution paradigm in handling complex naturalized tasks. Our code is publicly available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/NatureGAIA-721F/.

NaturalGAIA: A Verifiable Benchmark and Hierarchical Framework for Long-Horizon GUI Tasks

Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) testing is essential for automotive validation but suffers from fragmented and underutilized test artifacts. This paper presents HIL-GPT, an industry-deployed retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) system that integrates semantic retrieval with domain-adapted large language models to support test engineers in real-world HIL workflows. The system combines domain-specific embeddings to enable traceable retrieval of test cases and requirements under industrial latency and cost constraints. Through empirical evaluation, we show that compact, domain-adapted models can achieve a favorable trade-off among accuracy, latency, and cost compared to larger general-purpose models, challenging the assumption that larger models are always preferable in industrial NLP systems. An A/B user study further confirms that HIL-GPT improves perceived helpfulness, truthfulness, and satisfaction over general-purpose LLMs.

Smarter, not Bigger: Fine-Tuned RAG-Enhanced LLMs for Automotive HIL Testing

Multi-turn LLM agents are becoming pivotal to production systems, spanning customer service automation, e-commerce assistance, and interactive task management, where accurately distinguishing high-value informative signals from stochastic noise is critical for sample-efficient training. In real-world scenarios, a failure in a trivial task may reflect random instability, whereas success in a high-difficulty task signifies a genuine capability breakthrough. Yet, existing group-based policy optimization methods rigidly rely on statistical deviation within discrete batches, frequently misallocating credit when task difficulty fluctuates. To address this issue, we propose \textbf{Proximity-based Multi-turn Optimization (ProxMO)}, a practical and robust framework engineered specifically for the constraints of real-world deployment. ProxMO integrates global context via two lightweight mechanisms: success-rate-aware modulation dynamically adapts gradient intensity based on episode-level difficulty, while proximity-based soft aggregation derives baselines through continuous semantic weighting at the step level. Extensive evaluations on ALFWorld and WebShop benchmarks demonstrate that ProxMO yields substantial performance gains over existing baselines with negligible computational cost. Ablation studies further validate the independent and synergistic efficacy of both mechanisms. Crucially, ProxMO offers plug-and-play compatibility with standard GRPO frameworks, facilitating immediate, low-friction adoption in existing industrial training pipelines. Our implementation is available at: https://github.com/GithubX-F/ProxMO-RL.

Proximity-Based Multi-Turn Optimization: Practical Credit Assignment for LLM Agent Training

Literary translation poses unique challenges due to the scarcity of high-quality annotated data and the need to balance expression fluency with literary effect. We present a multi-aspect iterative refinement framework that generates high-quality translation references and preference data through specialized LLM translators, each targeting a distinct quality dimension. We leverage the generated data for supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning. Experiments show that our generated references outperform the original ground truth for SFT by 8.65 CEA100 points. For reinforcement learning, we find that DPO leads to performance degradation in this setting, while leveraging an explicit reward model for GRPO yields an additional 1.51 point improvement. We attribute this to the stability of two-stage training and GRPO's online exploration capability. Our resulting models, LitMT-8B and LitMT-14B, achieve 67.25 and 69.07 CEA100 respectively on the MetaphorTrans English-to-Chinese literary translation benchmark, competitive with Claude Sonnet 4.5 at 68.43, and demonstrate strong generalization to out-of-domain literary work (i.e., O. Henry).

Better Literary Translation: A Multi-Aspect Data Generation and LLM Training Approach

Person-Job Fit (PJF) is a critical component for online recruitment. Existing approaches face several challenges, particularly in handling low-quality job descriptions and similar candidate-job pairs, which impair model performance. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a large language model (LLM) based method with two novel techniques: (1) LLM-based data augmentation, which polishes and rewrites low-quality job descriptions by leveraging chain-of-thought (COT) prompts, and (2) category-aware Mixture of Experts (MoE) that assists in identifying similar candidate-job pairs. This MoE module incorporates category embeddings to dynamically assign weights to the experts and learns more distinguishable patterns for similar candidate-job pairs. We perform offline evaluations and online A/B tests on our recruitment platform. Our method relatively surpasses existing methods by 2.40% in AUC and 7.46% in GAUC, and boosts click-through conversion rate (CTCVR) by 19.4% in online tests, saving millions of CNY in external headhunting expenses.

Enhancing Online Recruitment with Category-Aware MoE and LLM-based Data Augmentation

Industrial Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems depend on optical character recognition (OCR) to transform visual documents into text. Existing OCR benchmarks rely on character-level metrics, which inadequately measure downstream RAG effectiveness under real-world conditions. We introduce an OCR benchmark for industrial RAG systems covering 11 challenging document types, including extreme layouts, high-resolution pages, complex or watermarked backgrounds, historical documents with non-standard reading orders, visually decorated text, and documents containing tables and mathematical formulas. Evaluating recent SOTA OCR models under a controlled OCR-first RAG pipeline shows clear performance degradation on realistic industrial documents despite strong conventional benchmark scores. We find that high OCR accuracy does not necessarily translate into strong downstream RAG performance: structural and semantic errors can cause substantial retrieval failures even when WER/CER remains low. Further analysis shows that this mismatch is category-dependent, arises through both retrieval-side and downstream generation-side failures, and remains stable across representative OCR-first pipeline choices.

When Good OCR Is Not Enough: Benchmarking OCR Robustness for Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Knowledge Graph–based Retrieval-Augmented Generation (KG-RAG) enables natural language interaction with structured enterprise knowledge, yet existing agentic approaches that perform well on public benchmarks often fail to generalize to real-world enterprise Knowledge Graphs (KGs), which are dense, schema-driven, and operationally constrained. To address these limitations, we propose SCAIR (Schema-Conditioned Agentic Iterative Reasoning), a training-free framework that integrates structured planning with controlled iterative reasoning by injecting schema-conditioned structural priors and enforcing schema-aware traversal during multi-hop reasoning. Experiments on an enterprise-oriented benchmark constructed from a real-world Configuration Management DataBase (CMDB) demonstrate that SCAIR substantially improves performance over existing KG-RAG methods. Crucially, our study highlights that reliable enterprise graph reasoning cannot rely on generic agentic designs; instead, it must explicitly incorporate the target domain's structural and operational constraints into the reasoning process. We demonstrate that by aligning agent design with business logic, substantial performance gains can be achieved without the need for costly model retraining.

SCAIR: Schema-Conditioned Agentic Iterative Reasoning for Enterprise Knowledge Graphs

Pricing automation in large-scale tourism is challenging due to informal orders and rapidly evolving, open-ended policies. Rule engines are brittle, while unconstrained LLM agents lack the reliability and auditability required for financial decisions. We present a production LLM-powered pricing system with a strict decision boundary: LLMs perform structured extraction and bounded policy/path selection, while all numeric pricing (including total-price computation) is executed deterministically. Policies are compiled into interpretable condition trees, exposing auditable artifacts and supporting human-in-the-loop control; tree induction and path matching are improved via periodic fine-tuning on logged traces. Deployed at a municipal state-owned tourism enterprise across 7 scenic sites and 12 business categories with 1,500+ operators, the system processed 3,960 orders in six months, reduced the order management team from 15–20 to 3, and cut per-order handling time from ∼10 minutes to < 2 minutes.

Downloads

Next from ACL 2026

Awakening Dormant Experts:Counterfactual Routing to Mitigate MoE Hallucinations

Similar lecture

U-trustworthy Models. Reliability, Competence, and Confidence in Decision-Making