United States

Current reinforcement learning objectives for large-model reasoning primarily focus on maximizing expected rewards. This paradigm can lead to overfitting to dominant reward signals, while neglecting alternative yet valid reasoning trajectories, thereby limiting diversity and exploration. To address this issue, we introduce Learning Advantage Distributions (LAD), a distribution-matching framework that replaces advantage maximization with learning the advantage-induced distribution. By establishing the equivalence between the optimal policy update and an advantage-based target distribution, we derive a practical LAD objective formulated as minimizing an 
$f$-divergence between the policy-induced and advantage-induced distributions. This yields a gradient update that increases likelihood for high-advantage responses while suppressing over-confident probability growth, preventing collapse without requiring auxiliary entropy regularization. LAD incurs no extra training cost compared to GRPO and scales naturally to LLM post-training. In a controlled bandit setting, LAD faithfully recovers the multimodal advantage distribution, validating the theoretical formulation. Experiments on math and code reasoning tasks across several LLM backbones show that LAD reliably improves both accuracy and generative diversity.

ACL 2026

 LAD: Learning Advantage Distribution for Reasoning

## Welcome!
"I am excited to welcome you to this year’s edition of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing! Importantly, it marks the 30th edition of EMNLP. With over 8,000 submissions, more than 3,000 accepted papers, and thousands of attendees, we have come a long way from that first
workshop, which had 14 accepted papers. As the field looks ahead, Suzhou is the fitting location for celebrating this milestone: rooted in a long literary tradition, yet modern and forward-looking, and home to a large share of the NLP community." 

*Message from the General Chair, Dirk Hovy*

EMNLP 2025

Celebrate 30 Years of EMNLP! 
EMNLP 2025 will be held in Suzhou, China from November 5th to November 9th, 2025.

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.

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.

While large language models show promise in medical applications, achieving expert-level clinical reasoning efficiently remains challenging due to the need for massive amounts of manually labeled data and large-scale models. To address this challenge, we propose Clinical-Oriented Reinforcement Learning (CORL), the first fully open-source, end-to-end reinforcement learning training pipeline in the clinical reasoning domain, incorporating a Reasoning-Oriented Data Strategy (RODS) based on topological synthesis, CoT cold-start, and two-stage reinforcement learning. Through CORL, we trained the Fleming-R1 series of models. Among them, Fleming-R1-7B significantly outperforms models of comparable size while approaching or even surpassing certain 32B and 72B models. Fleming-R1-32B achieves near-parity with GPT-4o and outperforms the strongest open-source alternatives up to 671B in MedXpertQA. This demonstrates that in clinical reasoning field, a meticulously designed training pipeline holds greater importance than scaling model size alone. Data and Models are available at https://github.com/UbiquantAI/Fleming-R1 and https://huggingface.co/collections/IQuestLab/fleming.

Scaling is Not All You Need: Clinical-Oriented Reinforcement Learning Makes Parameter-Efficient Clinical Reasoning

Adaptive multi-agent systems (MAS) are increasingly adopted as solutions to complex problems. However, their optimization for narrow task ranges leaves it unclear whether they can function as general-purpose systems. To fill this gap, we conduct an extensive empirical study on adaptive MAS, revealing two key findings: (1) they are prone to topological overfitting, defined as failures in domain transfer; and (2) they exhibit illusory coordination, where surface-level accuracy is high but underlying agent coordination deviates from ideal MAS behavior, raising concerns about their practical effectiveness. These observations highlight the urgent need to prioritize generalization in MAS development and motivate more thorough evaluation beyond correctness of the final answer.

 Superficial Success vs. Internal Breakdown: An Empirical Study of Generalization in Adaptive Multi-Agent Systems

Adapting language models to new data distributions by simple finetuning is challenging. This is due to the rigidity of their subword tokenizers, which typically remain unchanged during adaptation. This inflexibility often leads to inefficient tokenization, causing overfragmentation of text in out-of-distribution domains, unseen languages, or scripts. In this work, we develop byte-level LMs with learnable tokenizers to make tokenization adaptive. Our models include a submodule that learns to predict boundaries given the input byte sequence, encoding it into variable-length segments. Most tokenizer-free methods train this boundary predictor using an auxiliary loss that enforces a fixed compression rate across the training corpus, introducing a new kind of rigidity. We propose FLEXITOKENS, a simplified training objective that enables significantly greater flexibility during adaptation. Evaluating across multiple multilingual benchmarks, morphologically diverse tasks, and domains, we demonstrate that FLEXITOKENS consistently reduces token over-fragmentation and achieves up to 10% point improvements on token classification and generative tasks compared to BPE and other gradient-based tokenizer baselines. We validate our findings using models of varying sizes, and our method demonstrates consistent improvements across scales.

 FLEXITOKENS: Flexible Tokenization for Evolving Language Models

Estimating the persuasiveness of messages is critical in various applications, from recommender systems to safety assessment of LLMs. While it is imperative to consider the target persuadee's characteristics, such as their values, experiences, and reasoning styles, there is currently no established systematic framework to optimize leveraging a persuadee's past activities (e.g., conversations) to the benefit of a persuasiveness prediction model. To address this problem, we propose a context-aware user profiling framework with two trainable components: a query generator that generates optimal queries to retrieve persuasion-relevant records from a user's history, and a profiler that summarizes these records into a profile to effectively inform the persuasiveness prediction model.
Our evaluation on the ChangeMyView Reddit dataset shows consistent improvements over existing methods across multiple predictor models, raising F1 from 33% to 47% on Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct. Further analysis shows that effective user profiles are context-dependent and predictor-specific, rather than relying on static attributes or surface-level similarity. Together, these results highlight the importance of task-oriented, context-dependent user profiling for personalized persuasiveness prediction.

Learning to Retrieve User History and Generate User Profiles for Personalized Persuasiveness Prediction

Great novels create immersive worlds with rich character arcs, well-structured plots, and nuanced writing styles. 
However, current novel generation methods often rely on brief, simplistic story outlines and generate details using plain, generic language.
To bridge this gap, we introduce the task of $\textit{Imitative Novel Generation}$, which requires the generated novels to imitate the distinctive features of the original work, including understanding character profiles and world views, predicting plausible plot developments, and writing concrete details using vivid, expressive language.
To achieve this, we propose WriterAgent, a novel generation system designed to master the core aspects of literary imitative.
WriterAgent is trained through a curriculum learning paradigm, progressing from low-level stylistic mastery to high-level narrative coherence. 
Its key tasks include language style learning, character modeling, plot planning, and stylish writing, ensuring comprehensive narrative control.
To support this, WriterAgent leverages the WriterLoRA framework, an extension of LoRA with hierarchical and cumulative task-specific modules, each specializing in a different narrative aspect. 
We evaluate WriterAgent on multilingual classics like $\textit{Harry Potter}$ and $\textit{Dream of the Red Chamber}$, demonstrating its superiority over baselines in capturing the target author’s settings, character dynamics, and writing style to produce coherent, faithful narratives.
We hope this work inspires literary creativity in NLP: ${WriterAgent}$.

 From Style to Story: A Curriculum Learning Approach for Imitative Novel Generation

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are increasingly being deployed as automated content moderators. Within this landscape, we uncover a critical threat: Adversarial Smuggling Attacks. Unlike adversarial perturbations (for misclassification) and adversarial jailbreaks (for harmful output generation), adversarial smuggling exploits the Human-AI capability gap. It encodes harmful content into human-readable visual formats that remain AI-unreadable, thereby evading automated detection and enabling the dissemination of harmful content. We classify smuggling attacks into two pathways: (1) Perceptual Blindness, disrupting text recognition; and (2) Reasoning Blockade, inhibiting semantic understanding despite successful text recognition. To evaluate this threat, we constructed SmuggleBench, the first comprehensive benchmark comprising 1,700 adversarial smuggling attack instances. Evaluations on SmuggleBench reveal that both proprietary (e.g., GPT-5) and open-source (e.g., Qwen3-VL) SOTA models are vulnerable to this threat, producing Attack Success Rates (ASR) exceeding 90%. By analyzing the vulnerability through the lenses of perception and reasoning, we identify three root causes: the limited capabilities of vision encoders, the robustness gap in OCR, and the scarcity of domain-specific adversarial examples. We conduct a preliminary exploration of mitigation strategies, investigating the potential of test-time scaling (via CoT) and adversarial training (via SFT) to mitigate this threat.

Making MLLMs Blind: Adversarial Smuggling Attacks in MLLM Content Moderation

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated competitive performance in zero-shot multilingual machine translation (MT). Some follow-up works further improved MT performance via preference optimization, but they leave a key aspect largely underexplored: the order in which data samples are given during training. We address this topic by integrating curriculum learning into various state-of-the-art preference optimization algorithms to boost MT performance. We introduce a novel curriculum learning strategy with restarts (CLewR), which reiterates easy-to-hard curriculum multiple times during training to effectively mitigate the catastrophic forgetting of easy examples. We demonstrate consistent gains across several model families (Gemma2, Qwen2.5, Llama3.1) and preference optimization techniques. We publicly release our code at https://github.com/alexandra-dragomir/CLewR.

 CLewR: Curriculum Learning with Restarts for Machine Translation Preference Learning

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) enable sophisticated reasoning over images and videos, yet their inference is hindered by a systemic efficiency barrier known as visual token dominance. This overhead is driven by a multi-regime interplay between high-resolution feature extraction, quadratic attention scaling, and memory bandwidth constraints. We present a systematic taxonomy of efficiency techniques structured around the inference lifecycle, consisting of encoding, prefilling, and decoding. Unlike prior reviews focused on isolated optimizations, we analyze the end-to-end pipeline to reveal how upstream decisions dictate downstream bottlenecks, covering compute-bound visual encoding, the intensive prefilling of massive contexts, and the ''visual memory wall'' in bandwidth-bound decoding. By decoupling the efficiency landscape into the axes of shaping information density, managing long-context attention, and overcoming memory limits, this work provides a structured analysis of how isolated optimizations compose to navigate the trade-off between visual fidelity and system efficiency. The survey concludes by outlining four future frontiers supported by pilot empirical insights, including hybrid compression based on functional unit sensitivity, modality-aware decoding with relaxed verification, progressive state management for streaming continuity, and stage-disaggregated serving through hardware-algorithm co-design. The submitted software contains a snapshot of our literature repository, which is designed to be maintained as a living resource for the community.

Efficient Inference for Large Vision-Language Models: Bottlenecks, Techniques, and Prospects

Multi-agent systems utilizing large language models often assign authoritative roles to improve performance, yet the impact of authority bias on agent interactions remains underexplored. We present the first systematic analysis of role-based authority bias in free-form multi-agent evaluation using ChatEval. Applying French and Raven's power-based theory, we classify authoritative roles into legitimate, referent, and expert types and analyze their influence across 12-turn conversations. Experiments with GPT-4o and DeepSeek R1 reveal that Expert and Referent power roles exert stronger influence than Legitimate power roles. Crucially, authority bias emerges not through active conformity by general agents, but through authoritative roles consistently maintaining their positions while general agents demonstrate flexibility. Furthermore, authority influence requires clear position statements, as neutral responses fail to generate bias. These findings provide key insights for designing multi-agent frameworks with asymmetric interaction patterns.

 Belief in Authority: Impact of Authority in Multi-Agent Evaluation Framework

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly act as tool-using \emph{agents}, and existing methods for evaluating and optimizing tool usage by LLMs typically assume a static tool environment with fixed APIs and documentation. In practice, toolsets evolve as tools are added, changed, or deprecated, introducing instability for agents that must retain prior competence while adapting to new capabilities. We formalize this challenge as the stability--adaptation dilemma. To address it, we propose ContDa, a continual documentation adaptation framework that provides a generalizable solution to this problem, enabling LLM agents to self-evolve by updating tool documentation. ContDa combines relation-guided exploration, which leverages functionally related existing tools as anchors to probe and identify new tool capabilities, with relation-aware adjustment that organizes overlapping tools and explicitly encodes usage preferences and fallback options among them. We then introduce complementary metrics that disentangle performance from stability and adaptation. Experiments across three evolution patterns on dynamic extensions of StableToolBench and RestBench show that ContDa consistently improves average performance by enhancing the discovery of new capabilities while incurring only limited loss of previously solved tasks, demonstrating documentation adaptation as an effective and lightweight mechanism for robust tool use in evolving environments. Our code is available at https://github.com/Bingo-W/ContDa.

Downloads

Next from ACL 2026

Scaling is Not All You Need: Clinical-Oriented Reinforcement Learning Makes Parameter-Efficient Clinical Reasoning

Similar lecture

LAD: LoRA-Adapted Diffusion