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Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have shown strong generalization across multimodal tasks, but their capacity to handle sign language translation (SLT), which requires fine-grained spatiotemporal reasoning and linguistic understanding, remains unclear. In this study, we evaluate whether small VLMs (with $\leq$3B parameters) can perform SLT effectively. We perform supervised fine-tuning on four publicly available multilingual SLT datasets, including one German (DGS), two American (ASL), and one Indian (ISL), applying parameter-efficient LoRA to the language decoder while keeping the vision encoder frozen and training only the connector. To evaluate translation quality, we propose entity- and semantics-aware metrics tailored for SLT. We highlight the data imbalance issues present in the above widely used SLT datasets. Our analysis highlights the limitations in applying general-purpose VLMs to SLT, unlike their applicability in other tasks, and provides insights to inform future development of VLMs for SLP, which is essential for building inclusive AI applications.

ACL 2026

Can Small Vision–Language Models Perform Sign Language Translation?

### Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

Message from the General Chair: 
*It is my great pleasure and honor to welcome you to the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025), held in beautiful Vienna, Austria, from July 27 to August 1, 2025. ACL2025continues our field’s 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.* 
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ACL 2025

Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

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. 
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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.

In task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems, Slot Schema Induction (SSI) is essential for automatically identifying key information slots from dialogue data without manual intervention. This paper presents a novel state-of-the-art (SoTA) approach that formulates SSI as a text generation task, where a language model incrementally constructs and refines a slot schema over a stream of dialogue data. To develop this approach, we present a fully automatic LLM-based TOD simulation method that creates data with high-quality state labels for novel task domains. Furthermore, we identify issues in SSI evaluation due to data leakage and poor metric alignment with human judgment. We resolve these by creating new evaluation data using our simulation method with human guidance and correction, as well as designing improved evaluation metrics. These contributions establish a foundation for future SSI research and advance the SoTA in dialogue understanding and system development.

Generative Induction of Dialogue Task Schemas with Streaming Refinement and Simulated Interactions

Sarcasm detection remains a significant challenge due to its reliance on nuanced contextual understanding, world knowledge, and multi-faceted linguistic cues that vary substantially across different sarcastic expressions. Existing approaches, from fine-tuned transformers to large language models, apply a uniform reasoning strategy to all inputs, struggling to address the diverse analytical demands of sarcasm. These demands range from modeling contextual expectation violations to requiring external knowledge grounding or recognizing specific rhetorical patterns. To address this limitation, we introduce RAM-SD, a Retrieval-Augmented Multi-Agent framework for Sarcasm Detection. The framework operates through four stages: (1) contextual retrieval grounds the query in both sarcastic and non-sarcastic exemplars; (2) a meta-planner classifies the sarcasm type and selects an optimal reasoning plan from a predefined set; (3) an ensemble of specialized agents performs complementary, multi-view analysis; and (4) an integrator synthesizes these analyses into a final, interpretable judgment with a natural language explanation. Evaluated on four standard benchmarks, RAM-SD achieves a state-of-the-art Macro-F1 of 77.74%, outperforming the strong GPT-4o+CoC baseline by 7.01 points. Our framework not only sets a new performance benchmark but also provides transparent and interpretable reasoning traces, illuminating the cognitive processes behind sarcasm comprehension.

RAM-SD: Retrieval-Augmented Multi-agent framework for Sarcasm Detection

Embodied question answering (EQA) in 3D environments often requires collecting context that is distributed across multiple viewpoints and partially occluded. However, most recent vision--language models (VLMs) are constrained to a fixed and finite set of input views, which limits their ability to acquire question-relevant context at inference time and hinders complex spatial reasoning. We propose Chain-of-View (CoV) prompting, a training-free, test-time reasoning framework that transforms a VLM into an active viewpoint reasoner through a coarse-to-fine exploration process. CoV first employs a View Selection agent to filter redundant frames and identify question-aligned anchor views. It then performs fine-grained view adjustment by interleaving iterative reasoning with discrete camera actions, obtaining new observations from the underlying 3D scene representation until sufficient context is gathered or a step budget is reached.
We evaluate CoV on OpenEQA across four mainstream VLMs and obtain an average 11.98% improvement in LLM-Match, with a maximum gain of 13.62% on Qwen3-VL-Flash. CoV further exhibits test-time scaling: increasing the minimum action budget yields an additional 2.54% average improvement, peaking at 3.73% on Gemini-2.5-Flash. On ScanQA and SQA3D, CoV delivers strong performance (e.g., 116 CIDEr 31.9 EM@1 on ScanQA and 51.1 EM@1 on SQA3D). Overall, these results suggest that question-aligned view selection coupled with open-view search is an effective, model-agnostic strategy for improving spatial reasoning in 3D EQA without additional training.

CoV: Chain-of-View Prompting for Spatial Reasoning

In complex domains like interior design, user requests are often ambiguous and multimodal. Professional designers address this by asking strategic clarification questions based on hierarchical priorities, a capability lacking in current Vision-Language Models (VLMs). When fine-tuned on dialogue data, existing models often exhibit modality forgetting, overfitting to textual patterns while neglecting visual cues and thus producing hallucinated or visually irrelevant questions. To bridge this gap, we introduce VIDA (Visual Intent-driven Design Assistant), an assistant designed to generate proactive, visually grounded, and strategically prioritized clarification questions. Instead of standard fine-tuning, we propose a strategy-aware alignment framework that evolves from imitation learning to value-driven reinforcement. We utilize Group Sequence Policy Optimization to strictly enforce expert protocols, ensuring the model not only mimics fluent speech but also adheres to optimal inquiry strategies. Crucially, we design a novel hierarchical reward mechanism with Dynamic Intent Binding to align the assistant with professional prioritization standards. To facilitate this research, we construct and release InteriorClarify, a multimodal benchmark dataset comprising 1,016 real-world consultation cases annotated with this three-tier intent hierarchy. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VIDA sets a new state-of-the-art, improving the Strategic Alignment Score (SAS) by 20.59% over SFT baselines and effectively restoring visual grounding capabilities lost during standard fine-tuning.

VIDA: A Visual Intent-driven Design Assistant for Proactive Multimodal Clarification

Semantic segmentation is a core component of discourse analysis, yet existing models are primarily developed and evaluated on high-resource written text, limiting their effectiveness on low-resource conversational varieties. In particular, dialectal Arabic exhibits informal syntax, code-switching, and weakly marked discourse structure that challenge standard semantic segmentation approaches for text. In this paper, we introduce a new multi-genre benchmark (more than 1000 samples) for semantic segmentation in Arabic, focusing on dialectal discourse. The benchmark covers casual telephone conversations, code-switched podcasts, expressive dialogue, and broadcast news, and was annotated and validated by native Arabic annotators. Using this benchmark, we show that segmentation models performing well on MSA news genres degrade on dialectal conversational texts. We further propose a segmentation model that targets local semantic coherence and robustness to discourse discontinuities, consistently outperforming strong baselines on dialectal non-news genres. The benchmark and approach generalize to other low-resource spoken languages.

Linear Semantic Segmentation for Low-Resource Spoken Dialects

Recent work has increasingly explored neuron-level interpretation in vision-language models (VLMs) to identify neurons critical to final predictions. However, existing neuron analyses generally focus on single tasks, limiting the comparability of neuron importance across tasks. Moreover, ranking strategies tend to score neurons in isolation, overlooking how task-dependent information pathways shape the write-in effects of feed-forward network (FFN) neurons. This oversight can exacerbate neuron polysemanticity in multi-task settings, introducing noise into the identification and intervention of task-critical neurons. In this study, we propose HONES (**H**ead-**O**riented **N**euron **E**xplanation & **S**teering), a gradient-free framework for task-aware neuron attribution and steering in multi-task VLMs. HONES ranks FFN neurons by their causal write-in contributions conditioned on task-relevant attention heads, and further modulates salient neurons via lightweight scaling. Experiments on four diverse multimodal tasks and two popular VLMs show that HONES outperforms existing methods in identifying task-critical neurons and improves model performance after steering. Our source code is released at: https://github.com/petergit1/HONES.

From Heads to Neurons: Causal Attribution and Steering in Multi-Task Vision–Language Models

Learning unknown knowledge through ICL and RAG can enhance LLM capabilities in specialized fields. While most research focuses on how to identify and utilize such knowledge, little work examines what factors lead LLMs to trust and adopt it, leaving models prone to errors and harmful content. Grounded in extensive pre-experiments, we design five pairs of trust‑enhancing and trust‑diminishing transformations on unknown knowledge to experimentally identify the key trust factors. These findings are further substantiated through a detailed theoretical analysis grounded in the epistemological framework of evidentialism. Based on these insights, we challengingly propose a completely unrestricted and fully randomized jailbreak attack that embeds malicious queries within trust‑enhanced unknown knowledge. In both defended and undefended scenarios, our method achieves 99\% to 100\% ASR on all tested LLMs, including the latest GPT‑5.1, and becomes SOTA. This attack confirms the trust mechanism and exposes a critical and hard-to-defend security risk. Our conclusions provide valuable guidance for understanding trust mechanism of unknown knowledge and for future research.

How Do LLMs "Trust" Unknown Knowledge? An Unknown Knowledge Based Jailbreak Attack

Adapting large language models (LLMs) to domain-specific tasks via fine-tuning is often infeasible: models are protected by intellectual property, while sensitive data cannot be shared due to privacy regulations. A promising paradigm, Offsite Tuning (OT), addresses this challenge by constructing an emulator of the original model. Data owners leverage the emulator to train an adapter on downstream data, which is then plugged back into the original model, enabling knowledge transfer without transmitting either the original model or the raw data. However, emulators constructed by existing OT-based methods often retain substantial inference capabilities, thereby exposing model capability privacy and posing risks of misuse. To address this, we propose Loss Landscape Elevation Offsite Tuning (LLEOT), a framework that secures data privacy as well as model parameter and capability privacy. At its core, Loss Landscape Elevation (LLE) enforces a fixed margin between the loss landscapes of the emulator and the original model. We theoretically demonstrate that LLE simultaneously (i) degrades emulator inference via perplexity amplification and (ii) preserves gradient alignment, ensuring consistent convergence for adapter training. Extensive experiments confirm that LLEOT achieves strong adaptation performance while effectively mitigating emulator misuse. Code is available at https://github.com/Z-eloto/LLEOT.

LLEOT: A Privacy-Enhancing Offsite Tuning Framework via Loss Landscape Elevation

While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated the capacity for multi-modal reasoning, current Referring Expression Comprehension (REC) benchmarks lag behind, predominantly relying on intra-image cues and neglecting the integration of external world knowledge, which significantly impedes the evolution of REC towards real-world applications. This limitation obscures a model's true capability to conduct textual reasoning (entity resolution), resolve spatial location (visual grounding), and verify reference validity (hallucination rejection). To address this, we introduce KnowDR-REC, a targeted audit benchmark comprising 1,042 positive triplets derived from real-world knowledge, along with rigorously matched negative samples. Unlike traditional datasets, we implement a controllable counterfactual evaluation mechanism that subjects textual expressions to single-factor perturbations (entity, relation, or time) to test sensitivity to fine-grained factual changes. Extensive evaluation of 18 state-of-the-art LMMs exposes a critical ``binding hallucination,'' revealing that current high performance is often built on fragile visual shortcuts rather than true understanding. KnowDR-REC thus serves as a pivotal diagnostic instrument, steering future research toward the genuine integration of perception and reasoning.

KnowDR-REC: Auditing Knowledge-Conditioned Visual Grounding in Referring Expression Comprehension

Language evolution is cognitively motivated by the reduction of communicative effort. Current research exploring this reported tendency has been constrained by the heavy reliance on manually annotated resources (e.g., dependency parsing) as well as a narrow focus (e.g., syntax as the single metric). To transcend these limitations, we propose two measures: Attention-based Structural Distance (ASD) and Semantic Space Distance (SSD). ASD is a parser-free measure of syntactic locality derived from the attention mechanism of pretrained large language models (LLM), while SSD is a measure of lexical distances that quantify the degree of separation between different parts of speech in the word vector space. Based on multiple diachronic and multilingual corpora, our experiments show a significant decrease of ASD while an increase of SSD, which implies a language developmental trend towards structural compactness and semantic divergence. Our research pioneers a novel lens grounded in LLM for studying language evolution, which has two major contributions. Linguistically, our study corroborates the hypothesized law of human language evolution by demonstrating that its development optimizes syntactic locality as well as functional semantic discriminability. Cognitively, our study shows that human and LLMs share common characteristics in language processing, lending support to the potential of employing LLMs in the study of human cognition.

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Generative Induction of Dialogue Task Schemas with Streaming Refinement and Simulated Interactions

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