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Large Language Models are being increasingly deployed as the decision-making core of autonomous agents capable of effecting change in external environments. Yet, in conversational benchmarks, which simulate real-world customer-centric issue resolution scenarios, these agents frequently fail due to the cascading effects of incorrect decision-making. These challenges are particularly pronounced for open-source LLMs with smaller parameter sizes, limited context windows, and constrained inference budgets, which contribute to increased error accumulation in agentic settings. To tackle these challenges, we present the **Failure-Aware Meta-Agentic (FAMA)** framework. FAMA operates in two stages: first, it analyzes failure trajectories from baseline agents to identify the most prevalent errors; second, it employs an orchestration mechanism that activates a minimal subset of specialized agents tailored to address these failures by injecting a targeted context for the tool-use agent before the decision-making step. Experiments across open-source LLMs demonstrate performance gains up to **27%** across evaluation modes over standard baselines. These results highlight that targeted curation of context through specialized agents to address common failures is a valuable design principle for building reliable, multi-turn tool-use LLM agents that simulate real-world conversational scenarios.

ACL 2026

FAMA: Failure-Aware Meta-Agentic Framework for Open-Source LLMs in Interactive Tool Use Environments

## 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.

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) 
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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.

Role-playing has garnered rising attention as it provides a strong foundation for human-machine interaction and facilitates sociological research. 
However, current work is confined to textual modalities, neglecting speech, which plays a predominant role in daily life, thus limiting genuine role-playing. 
To bridge this gap, we conceptualize and benchmark speech role-playing through ActorMindBench, and we present a corresponding reasoning framework, called ActorMind. Specifically, (1) Speech Role-Playing enables models to deliver spontaneous responses with personalized verbal traits based on their role, the scene, and spoken dialogue. (2) ActorMindBench is a hierarchical benchmark comprises Utterance-Level content with 7,653 utterances, Scene-Level content with 313 scenes, and Role-Level content with 6 roles. (3) ActorMind is an off-the-shelf, multi-agent, chain-of-though style reasoning framework that emulates how human actors perform in theaters. Concretely, ActorMind first reads its assigned role description via Eye Agent, then comprehends emotional cues within contextual spoken dialogues through Ear Agent. Subsequently, Brain Agent generates a descriptive emotional state, and finally, Mouth Agent delivers the scripts infused with corresponding emotion state. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of ActorMind in enhancing speech role-playing. The project page is available at https://github.com/OzymandiasChen/ActorMind.

ActorMind: Emulating Human Actor Reasoning for Speech Role-Playing

Existing work on value alignment typically characterizes value relations statically, ignoring how alignment interventions—such as prompting, fine-tuning, or preference optimization—reshape the broader value system. 
In practice, aligning a target value can implicitly shift other values, creating value trade-offs that remain largely unmeasured.
We introduce the VAT, a framework that quantifies value trade-offs by measuring how alignment-induced changes propagate across interconnected values relative to achieved on-target gain. VAT captures the system-level dynamics of value expression under alignment intervention, enabling evaluation of both intended improvements and unintended side effects.
Using a controlled scenario–action dataset grounded in Schwartz value theory, we collect paired pre–post normative judgments and analyze alignment effects across models, values, and interventions. Results show that alignment often produces uneven and structured co-movement among values, revealing systematic trade-offs between target and non-target values. These effects are largely invisible under conventional target-only evaluation, but become evident via VAT, highlighting process-level alignment risks and offering new insights into the dynamic nature of value alignment in LLMs.
Dataset and code are open-sourced.

VALUE ALIGNMENT TAX: Measuring Value Trade-offs in LLM Alignment

Recent automated transcription systems have focused on end-to-end orthographic approaches driven by deep neural networks and sequence-to-sequence transformers. Growing public interest in transcription at the phonemic or phonetic level has led to re-purposing these systems to segment and identify phones, the basic sounds which comprise human speech. However, they miss the mark on a fundamental component of time-series analysis, namely time. For linguistic applications which require high fidelity in the temporal domain, the loss of timing information is untenable. Our work proposes a deadline-bounded expectation maximization (EM) algorithm with a novel initialization method to estimate formants, i.e., salient speech frequencies, for enhanced phonetic segmentation. Based on the concept of spectral gravity, i.e., treating spectral energy as mass attenuated by the square of frequency distance across the spectrum, our technique outperforms the recent state of the art on key clustering metrics, generating reasonable alignments across multiple languages with no a priori training.

Spectral Gravity Formant Estimation for Phonetic Segmentation

We reformulate explanation quality assessment as a ranking problem rather than a generation problem. Instead of optimizing models to produce a single “best” explanation token-by-token, we train reward models to discriminate among multiple candidate explanations and learn their relative quality. Concretely, we construct per-instance candidate sets with graded quality levels and train listwise and pairwise ranking models (ListNet, LambdaRank, RankNet) to preserve ordinal structure and avoid score compression typical of pointwise regression or binary preference objectives. We observe three findings: First, ranking losses consistently outperform regression on score separation across all domains tested. Second, the optimal ranking loss depends on data characteristics: listwise objectives excel with well-separated quality tiers, while pairwise methods are more robust to noisy natural annotations. Third, when trained on carefully curated and well-structured data, small encoder models can match models that are orders of magnitude larger, suggesting that data quality matters more than model scale. Finally, when used as rewards in policy optimization, ranking-based scores enable stable convergence in settings where regression-based rewards fail entirely. Code and data are available at: https://github.com/Tankiit/PPO_Learning_to_rank

Explanation Quality Assessment as Ranking with Listwise Rewards

Reinforcement learning (RL) is widely applied to boost the performance of pretrained models, yet its training efficiency is severely constrained by rollout generation. While speculative decoding based on multi-token prediction (MTP) offers a potential acceleration pathway, its widespread adoption is hindered by the absence of MTP in vanilla pretrained models and the rapid degradation of the MTP acceptance length in RL training. To address these issues, this paper proposes MTP-RL, a two-stage framework that pioneers effective training of MTPs in RL and accelerates the rollout phase for diverse models. It involves a pipeline to equip the multi-layer parameter-sharing MTP for all models and an innovative advantage-aware MTP optimization strategy to facilitate policy-aligned training of MTPs. Experiments demonstrate that our method not only achieves stable growth of acceptance length during RL training, but also accelerates RL rollouts, achieving an average 23.1%–55.3% reduction in rollout time compared to baselines.

MTP-RL: Acceleration of Reinforcement Learning Rollouts with Policy-Aligned Multi-Token Prediction

Biomedical data-to-text generation aims at generating textual natural language descriptions that can fluently and precisely describe the biomedical structured data. However, biomedical data-to-text generation faces the dilemma of a lack of labeled data due to the privacy and scarcity of medical data. Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated the ability to solve few-shot tasks through in-context learning (ICL). In this paper, we are the first to explore the performance of different LLMs in the biomedical data-to-text generation task.To address the issues of semantic sparsity and misinterpretation of numerical values in biomedical structured data, we propose an EAG (Enrich, Aggregate, and Generate) framework, a simple but efficient LLM-based three-stage biomedical D2T approach in low-resource scenarios. We conduct extensive evaluations of closed-source general LLMs, open-source general LLMs, and open-source medical LLMs. The results show that the EAG framework provides good interpretability and superior performance, achieving state-of-the-art performance on the BioLeaflets dataset. The code and data will be released at https://github.com/FXLP/EAG.

Enrich, Aggregate, and Generate: Three-stage Biomedical Data-to-Text Generation Using Large Language Models in Low-resource Scenarios

Reasoning-oriented language models typically expose explicit reasoning as a long, front-loaded chain of “thinking” tokens before the main output, either always enabled or externally toggled at inference time. Although this can help on arithmetic, coding, and other multi-step tasks, it is costly, weakens claim-level auditability, and does not allow the model to re-trigger explicit reasoning once presentation has begun. In dialogue, these limitations are compounded by weak sensitivity to temporal structure: unless time is explicitly stated in text, standard models treat replies separated by seconds and replies separated by weeks as equivalent. We introduce TIME (Temporally Intelligent Meta-reasoning Engine), a behavioral alignment framework that learns explicit reasoning as a context-triggered control policy rather than a fixed response mode. TIME augments dialogue with optional ISO 8601 `<time>` tags, tick events that represent silent time passage, and short `<think>` blocks that may appear anywhere in a response. Using a four-phase curriculum, including a small maximally diverse full-batch alignment stage, we train Qwen3 dense models to invoke brief, in-place reasoning bursts only when contextual cues warrant them, while keeping user-facing output compact. We also introduce TIMEBench, a diagnostic benchmark for evaluating reasoning from temporal cues in dialogue. Across 4B-32B scales, TIME improves TIMEBench scores over the corresponding base Qwen3 models in both thinking and no-thinking modes while reducing explicit reasoning tokens by roughly an order of magnitude. Beyond score improvements, TIME induces a distinct behavioral shift: explicit reasoning becomes more compact and more responsive to contextual cues. Code, training data, and benchmark artifacts are publicly available.

TIME: Temporally Intelligent Meta-reasoning Engine for Context-Triggered Explicit Reasoning

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for creative tasks such as literary translation. Yet translational creativity remains underexplored and is rarely evaluated at scale, while source-text comprehension is typically studied in isolation, despite the fact that, in professional translation, comprehension and creativity are tightly intertwined. We address these gaps with a paired-task framework applied to literary excerpts from 11 books. Task 1 assesses source-text comprehension, and Task 2 evaluates translational creativity through Units of Creative Potential (UCPs), such as metaphors and wordplay. Using a scalable evaluation setup that combines expert human annotations with UCP-based automatic scoring, we benchmark 23 models and four creativity-oriented prompts. Our findings show that strong comprehension does not translate into human-level creativity: models often produce literal or contextually inappropriate renderings, with particularly large gaps for the more distant English–Chinese language pair. Creativity-oriented prompts yield only modest gains, and only one model, Mistral-Large, comes close to human-level creativity (0.167 vs. 0.246). Across all model–prompt combinations, only three exceed a creativity score of 0.1, while the rest remain at or near zero.

Beyond Reproduction: A Paired-Task Framework for Assessing LLM Comprehension and Creativity in Literary Translation

Large language models (LLMs), despite strong performance on complex mathematical problems, exhibit systematic limitations in counting tasks. This issue arises from the architectural limits of transformers, where counting is performed across layers, leading to degraded precision for larger counting problems due to depth constraints. To address this limitation, we propose a simple test-time strategy inspired by System-2 cognitive processes that decomposes large counting tasks into smaller, independent sub-problems that the model can reliably solve. We evaluate this approach using observational and causal mediation analyses to understand the underlying mechanism of this System-2-like strategy. Our mechanistic analysis identifies key components: latent counts are computed and stored in the final item representations of each part, transferred to intermediate steps via dedicated attention heads, and aggregated in the final stage to produce the total count. Experimental results demonstrate that this strategy enables LLMs to surpass architectural limitations and achieve higher accuracy on large-scale counting tasks. This work provides mechanistic insight into System-2 counting in LLMs and presents a generalizable approach for improving and understanding their reasoning behavior.

Mechanistic Interpretability of Large-Scale Counting in LLMs through a System-2 Strategy

We study how large language models recall relational knowledge during text generation, with a focus on identifying latent representations suitable for relation classification via linear probes.
Prior work shows how attention heads and MLPs interact to resolve subject, predicate, and object, but it remains unclear which representations support faithful linear relation classification and why some relation types are easier to capture linearly than others.
We systematically evaluate different latent representations derived from attention head and MLP contributions, showing that per-head attention contributions to the residual stream are comparatively strong features for linear relation classification.
Feature attribution analyses of the trained probes, as well as characteristics of the different relation types, reveal clear correlations between probe accuracy and relation specificity, entity connectedness, and how distributed the signal on which the probe relies is across attention heads.
Finally, we show how token-level feature attribution of probe predictions can be used to reveal probe behavior in further detail.

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