United States

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enhances large language models (LLMs) by grounding them in external knowledge. However, its application in sensitive domains is limited by privacy risks. Existing private RAG methods typically rely on query-time differential privacy (DP), which requires repeated noise injection and leads to accumulated privacy loss. To address this issue, we propose DP-SynRAG, a framework that uses LLMs to generate differentially private synthetic RAG databases. Unlike prior methods, the synthetic text can be reused once created, thereby avoiding repeated noise injection and additional privacy costs. To preserve essential information for downstream RAG tasks, DP-SynRAG extends private prediction, which instructs LLMs to generate text that mimics subsampled database records in a DP manner. Experiments show that DP-SynRAG achieves superior performance to the state-of-the-art private RAG systems while maintaining a fixed privacy budget, offering a scalable solution for privacy-preserving RAG.

ACL 2026

Differentially Private Synthetic Text Generation for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)

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ACL 2024

The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. More information will be announced soon.

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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.

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) 
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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.

Although language model–based chat systems are increasingly used in daily life, most Americans remain non-adopters of chat-based LLMs --- as of June 2025, 66% had never used ChatGPT. At the same time, LLM development and evaluation rely mainly on data from adopters (e.g., logs, preference data), focusing on the needs and tasks for a limited demographic group of adopters in terms of geographic location, education, and gender. In this position paper, we argue that incorporating \textit{non-adopter} perspectives is essential for developing broadly useful and capable LLMs. We contend that relying on methods that focus primarily on adopters will risk missing a range of tasks and needs prioritized by non-adopters, entrenching inequalities in who benefits from LLMs, and creating oversights in model development and evaluation. To illustrate this claim, we conduct case studies with non-adopters and show: how non-adopter needs diverge from those of current users, how non-adopter needs point us towards novel reasoning tasks, and how to systematically integrate non-adopter needs via human-centered methods.

Attention to Non-Adopters

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate strong capabilities across a wide range of complex tasks and are increasingly deployed at scale, placing significant demands on inference efficiency. Prior work typically decomposes inference into prefill and decode stages, with the decode stage dominating total latency. To reduce time and memory complexity in the decode stage, a line of work introduces sparse-attention algorithms. In this paper, we show, both empirically and theoretically, that sparse attention can paradoxically increase end-to-end complexity: information loss often induces significantly longer sequences, a phenomenon we term ``Less is Less'' (Lil). To mitigate the Lil problem, we propose an early-stopping algorithm that detects the threshold where information loss exceeds information gain during sparse decoding. Our early-stopping algorithm reduces token consumption by up to 90% with a marginal accuracy degradation of less than 2% across reasoning-intensive benchmarks.

Lil: Less is Less When Applying Post-Training Sparse-Attention Algorithms in Long-Decode Stage

Information seeking bridges the knowledge gap between a query and its answer. Although LLMs perform well broadly, their ability to close this gap is limited by pretraining and degrades on specialized or up-to-date queries. A common remedy augments LLMs with external knowledge, either by injecting retrieved evidence into context or interleaving retrieval with reasoning. The former limits exploration of layered dependencies, while the latter is bounded by context length, constraining efficiency and scalability. For complex tasks with intricate dependencies and large text volumes, both approaches become inadequate.

To tackle this bottleneck, we present AWARE (Agentic Knowledge Warehouse), an agentic knowledge warehousing framework that transforms heterogeneous, unstructured data into minimal, task-conditioned knowledge representations consumable by LLMs. Rather than exposing raw text, AWARE constructs knowledge through intent planning, online multi-threaded exploration, and map-reduce evidence integration, producing compact, LLM-ready context under finite budgets. Specifically, it applies offline document structuring to generate document headers that support controlled access, performs exploration with targeted refinement to recover layered information dependencies, and integrates distributed evidence into task-aware representations for downstream answer generation. Experiments on GAIA, WebWalker, and BrowseComp-Plus show improvements over all baselines

AWARE: Agentic Knowledge Warehousing for Contextual Intelligence

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to screen and rank job applicants, creating incentives for candidates to strategically manipulate algorithmic hiring systems. We study prompt injection in automated résumé screening, defined as subtle self-promotional text that introduces no new qualifications but is designed to influence LLM evaluations. Using controlled experiments, we show that prompt injection reliably improves applicant rankings when résumé quality is homogeneous and few candidates inject. However, its effectiveness rapidly diminishes as more candidates inject, collapsing when manipulation becomes widespread. When candidate quality is heterogeneous, prompt injection is less effective on average, but can occasionally allow lower-quality candidates to outrank higher-quality ones, raising fairness concerns. Overall, LLM-based screening is most vulnerable when manipulation is rare and candidate quality differences are small.

Prompt Injection in Automated Résumé Screening with Large Language Models: Single and Multi-Injection Settings

Prior work has explored multi-turn interaction and feedback for LLM writing, but evaluations still largely center on prompts and localized feedback, leaving persistent public reception in online communities underexamined. We test whether broadcast community discussion improves stand-up comedy writing in a controlled multi-agent sandbox: in the discussion condition, critic and audience threads are recorded, filtered, stored as social memory, and later retrieved to condition subsequent generations, whereas the baseline omits discussion. Across 50 rounds (250 paired monologues) judged by five expert annotators using A/B preference and a 15-item rubric, discussion wins 75.6% of instances and improves Craft/Clarity (Δ = 0.440) and Social Response (Δ = 0.422), with occasional increases in aggressive humor.

Multi-Agent Comedy Club: Investigating Community Discussion Effects on LLM Humor Generation

With the rapid growth of scientific publications, researchers struggle to efficiently assess the relevance of numerous papers. Identifying the types of contributions an article makes can help readers quickly grasp its significance. The ACL Rolling Review (ARR) introduced a typology requiring authors to specify their contributions to improve review quality and fairness. However, the current typology lacks clear definitions and guidance, leading to inconsistent labeling and raising concerns about its reliability.
Our re-annotation campaign reveals substantial disagreement between authors and domain experts. Moreover, the predictions of large language models (LLMs), when compared with expert annotations, tend to be close to those provided by the authors. These findings suggest a potential path toward better annotation reliability within the ARR process.

Towards Reliable Paper Contributions Annotation in the ACL Rolling Review

While Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) excel at complex tasks via long Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning, their outputs are often excessively verbose, leading to inefficiency. This problem is amplified when the student’s long-form reasoning mismatches the concise outputs of smaller teacher models—common in LLM distillation to avoid using costly large teachers. To address this issue, we propose Distilled Reasoning Pruning (DRP), a hybrid framework that combines inference-time pruning with tuning-based distillation. DRP leverages a teacher model to perform mathematical problem-solving skill-aware step decomposition and pruning, then distills the refined reasoning paths into a student model, enabling efficient and accurate reasoning. Across challenging math datasets, DRP significantly reduces token usage without sacrificing accuracy—for instance, cutting tokens on GSM8K from 917 to 328 while improving accuracy from 91.7% to 94.1%, and reducing AIME tokens by 43% with no performance drop. Further analysis shows that aligning training CoT structure with the student’s capacity is key to effective knowledge transfer.

 DRP: Distilled Reasoning Pruning with Mathematical Skill-aware Step Decomposition for Efficient Large Reasoning Models

Large language models (LLMs) rely on both contextual knowledge and parametric memory, yet these sources can conflict. Prior analysis largely focused on contextual question answering, suggesting that models tend to favor parametric knowledge under conflict, but this setting assumes that tasks should always rely on the provided passage. It therefore remains unclear how LLMs behave when \emph{tasks demand different kinds and degrees of knowledge utilization}. We address this gap with a model-agnostic diagnostic framework that holds underlying knowledge constant while injecting controlled conflicts across tasks with varying knowledge requirements. Evaluating representative open-source LLMs, we find that: (1) performance degradation under conflict correlates with a task’s knowledge reliance rather than conflict plausibility alone; (2) strategies such as explanatory rationales or reiteration increase context reliance, helping context-only tasks but harming those that require parametric knowledge; and (3) these behaviors bias model-based evaluation, raising concerns about the reliability of LLMs as judges. Together, our findings show that context–memory conflict is fundamentally task-dependent and motivate task-aware approaches to balancing context and memory in LLM deployment and evaluation.

Task Matters: Knowledge Requirements Shape LLM Responses to Context–Memory Conflict

Role-playing prompts effectively steer Large Language Models (LLMs), yet the neural mechanism driving this behavioral shift remains unclear. In this work, we identify Role-Sensitive Neurons (RSNs)—a sparse sub-network (≈ 0.5% of all neurons) governing the transition from hesitation to action. Using a novel evaluation framework with explicit abstention (MMLU-E), we reveal a Confidence-Performance Decoupling: roles primarily modulate the model's probabilistic "willingness to act" rather than its underlying knowledge representation. We demonstrate that RSNs function as a mechanistic gain control system: causal intervention on this subspace allows precise regulation of abstention behavior. Furthermore, cross-model transfer experiments confirm that these circuits are indigenous to pre-training, with Instruction Tuning (SFT) acting merely as a "signal sharpener" to refine latent gain dynamics. Finally, we identify a critical safety boundary: in knowledge-deficient models, amplifying RSNs induces "unwarranted certainty," highlighting decisiveness as a tunable gain parameter distinct from epistemic truth.

Role-Sensitive Neurons: A Neuron-Level Gain Control Mechanism for Confidence Steering

While Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning enhances code generation in Large Language Models (LLMs), it introduces a critical challenge in uncertainty estimation: Confidence Saturation. Existing calibration methods, such as Self-Consistency, rely on the assumption that consensus implies correctness. This assumption fails under systematic errors, where models confidently repeat flawed logic, leading to miscalibrated high-confidence predictions. To address this, we introduce NeuroSym-Cal, a hierarchical calibration framework. We posit that reliable confidence requires interrogating the model at two complementary levels: the extrinsic consensus of its symbolic outputs and the intrinsic sensitivity of its latent reasoning. Specifically, we propose Reasoning Sensitivity Analysis to measure the local curvature of the deductive process via latent perturbation, providing a fine-grained signal that persists even when output consensus saturates. These orthogonal features are fused by a Contextual Calibration Network to predict correctness. Experiments across state-of-the-art reasoning models (e.g., DeepSeek-R1) demonstrate that NeuroSym-Cal effectively de-saturates overconfident errors, achieving state-of-the-art Expected Calibration Error (ECE) and superior selective generation performance on Out-Of-Domain (OOD) benchmarks.

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Attention to Non-Adopters

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The Good and The Bad: Exploring Privacy Issues in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)