United States

As advanced RAG variants like GraphRAG and Agentic RAG emerge, one leading question is when and how to use them. Here, we introduce a framework for different RAG scenarios evaluation and comparison on semi-structured knowledge bases, including regular RAG, GraphRAG, Modular RAG and Agentic RAG. We provide implementation for 9 standardized RAG scenarios, and conduct experiments for a comprehensive comparison. These scenarios are designed for real use cases regarding data and domain restrictions, spanning from simple document-based retrieval to advanced features such as hybrid text-graph retrieval, integration with computed or pre-defined domain knowledge graphs, agentic multi-step planning, and agent-graph integration. Besides, we present a novel context engineering method for GraphRAG and Agentic RAG, addressing the context/memory overflow issues, efficiently managing text and graph retrievals with new representations and agentic loop design, leading to 19%-53% reduction on token usage. Moreover, further analysis identifies a retrieval-generation gap where expanded retrieval does not proportionally improve generation quality, suggesting retrieval-oriented metrics overstate advanced retrieval benefits. This work provides data-driven insights on when and how to use them for building production-ready intelligent RAG systems.

ACL 2026

Is GraphRAG Needed? From Basic RAG to Graph-/Agentic Solutions with Context Optimization

context engineering

graphrag

agentic rag

semi-structured knowledge base

retrieval-augmented generation

knowledge graphs

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. <br>
[Full Message from General Chair Philipp Koehn](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QiJFOmMjvDgsDo3i1XzlQnImxe3RU_Cy/view?usp=sharing) <br><br><br>
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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.

workshop paper

Automatic evaluation in industrial settings requires models to interpret and apply natural language rubrics reliably under language and domain shift. This challenge is compounded when reference answers are unavailable and proprietary models cannot be deployed due to data-governance constraints. We present E-Star-12B, a 12B-parameter evaluator for Korean industrial environments that jointly addresses rubric following and domain adaptation. Our approach combines a structured evaluation format—feedback, highlight, and decision—with a 6K high-confidence training set via multi-stage consensus-based filtering. We introduce two benchmarks: Ko Feedback Bench for rubric-following evaluation under Korean language transfer, and RAG Quality Bench for domain-specific evaluation in financial and legal settings. E-Star-12B achieves the strongest rubric alignment among small language models on Ko Feedback Bench, improving Pearson correlation by +0.173 over its base model. On RAG Quality Bench, the domain-adapted variant approaches frontier-model performance with more stable adaptation than general instruct models. Strong rubric-following capability serves as a reliable scaffold for subsequent domain adaptation.

E-star 12B: Reliable Rubric-Following and Domain-Adaptive SLM Evaluator for Korean Industrial Settings

Linear probes trained on internal activations of Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly proposed as evaluation metrics for deceptive generation, automated monitors that score whether a model's output was produced deceptively, without requiring ground-truth labels or human annotation. Yet these metrics report AUROC scores exceeding 0.96 on clean benchmarks while demonstrating profound fragility under distributional shift. This paper presents a systematic pressure-test of such probe-based evaluation metrics across the Gemma 3 model family (1B–27B parameters), diagnosing why they fail rather than merely documenting that they fail. We investigate four competing hypotheses about how deception is encoded: as (1) a single linear direction, (2) a multi-dimensional subspace, (3) a convex conic hull, or (4) a proxy for computational entropy. Our experimental design includes cross-domain transfer matrices, multi-dimensional probe analysis with permutation null baselines, entropy-residualization tests, and systematic distractor evaluations across 8 stylistic shifts. Across all four model scales, we find that: (a) probe-based metrics achieve near-perfect AUROC ($\ge$0.998) on clean data but collapse under stylistic shifts when trained without stylistic augmentation, style-augmented probes recover near-perfect detection (mean AUROC~0.979--0.983) even on unseen styles; (b) the single-direction hypothesis is decisively rejected (k=1 captures only 0.61–0.80 AUROC of the signal, with cross-domain transfer failure confirmed as geometric rather than layer-mismatch-driven; (c) the entropy-proxy hypothesis is rejected (maximum $|\rho|=0.454$, maximum $\Delta$AUROC after residualization=0.004); and (d) deception does not form a statistically significant linear subspace even within individual domains (per-domain $k^*{=}0$), yet multi-dimensional probes (k$\ge$5) consistently recover the signal through distributed sub-threshold features. These findings demonstrate that probe fragility under standard training reflects distributional narrowness rather than a fundamental architectural limitation: style-augmented probes recover near-perfect detection (mean AUROC 0.979–0.983 on unseen styles) at both the 4B and 27B scales, establishing that the inverse scaling pattern observed under standard training is a training-distribution artifact rather than a genuine scale-dependent phenomenon.

Pressure-Testing Deception Probes in LLMs: Scaling, Robustness, and the Geometry of Deceptive Representations

Automated evaluation of student responses has developed along two largely separate tracks: Automated Essay Scoring (AES), which emphasizes holistic writing quality, and Automatic Short Answer Grading (ASAG), which emphasizes factual correctness and rubric alignment. We introduce S-GRADES, an open-source benchmark consolidating 14 AES and ASAG datasets (37K+ responses) with a standardized evaluation framework, and use it to systematically evaluate three frontier LLMs across six reasoning configurations. Our results show that hybrid prompting generally performs best, AES is more predictable than ASAG, and cross-dataset exemplar transfer is often unstable, especially across paradigms. These findings highlight the need for unified, benchmark-driven evaluation of reliability and generalization in LLM-based student assessment. This work is published at LREC-2026 and available on arXiv (https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.10233). The benchmark is publicly accessible at https://sgrades.eng.unt.edu.

S-GRADES - Studying Generalization of Student Response Assessments in Diverse Evaluative Settings

LLM-as-Judge systems are increasingly used to generate labels and evaluate conversational data, yet their susceptibility to narrative framing remains underexplored. We study whether replacing one speaker’s username with the first-person identifier 'Me' systematically biases model judgments independent of the underlying evidence. Using the Conversations Gone Awry corpus, we evaluate four LLMs across three judgment tasks (attack detection, attacker identification, and blame attribution), three perspective conditions, and two evidence visibility settings. Our results show that narrative perspective induces strong, task-dependent distortions, particularly in more subjective judgment tasks. We find that models systematically favor the narrator when a speaker is presented as 'Me', reducing blame and responsibility attribution toward that speaker even when the underlying evidence is unchanged. These findings raise concerns about using LLMs to judge or moderate first-person conversational data.

Sycophancy Negatively Affects LLM-as-a-Judge in Conflict Evaluation

Evaluating multimodal generations is challenging: human evaluation is costly, and single-model LLM-as-a-judge pipelines can be brittle and provide limited uncertainty signals. We introduce Concord, an ensemble-based evaluation pipeline that aggregates discrete judgments from multiple LLM judges and uses inter-judge agreement as a practical uncertainty signal for disagreement-driven triage. We evaluate Concord on AVSSD and SCORE-AVS, a ground-truth-supervised audio-visual benchmark with discrete labels (True/False or 0–5). Concord improves agreement with human judgments over single-judge and naive aggregation baselines, and prioritizing low-agreement instances focuses human review on the most ambiguous cases. We use locally hosted open-source judges and include the binary results for online larger scale models GPT4.o mini turbo and Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite.

Concord: An Agreement-Aware Multi-Adjudication Pipeline for LLM Evaluation

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used to support scientific research, but their knowledge of scientific advancements can quickly become outdated. We introduce ScienceMeter, a new framework for evaluating scientific knowledge update methods over scientific knowledge spanning the past, present, and future. ScienceMeter defines three metrics: knowledge preservation, the extent to which models' understanding of previously learned papers are preserved; knowledge acquisition, how well scientific claims from newly introduced papers are acquired; and knowledge projection, the ability of the updated model to anticipate or generalize to related scientific claims that may emerge in the future. Using ScienceMeter, we examine the scientific knowledge of LLMs on claim judgment and generation tasks across a curated dataset across ten domains. We evaluate five representative knowledge update approaches and find that the best-performing knowledge update methods can preserve only 85.9% of existing knowledge, acquire 71.7% of new knowledge, and project 37.7% of future knowledge, underscoring that developing robust scientific knowledge update mechanisms is both crucial and challenging.

ScienceMeter: Tracking Scientific Knowledge Updates in Language Models

Large Language Models are increasingly used as zero-shot classifiers in complex reasoning tasks. However, standard constrained decoding suffers from a phenomenon we define as Renormalization Bias. When a model is restricted to a small set of target labels, the standard softmax operation discards the probability mass assigned to semantic synonyms in the original distribution. This loss of information, which we call the Silent Vote, results in artificial overconfidence and poor calibration. We propose Semantic Softmax, an inference-time layer that recovers this lost information by aggregating the scores of the semantic neighborhood surrounding each target label. We evaluate this approach on Qwen-3 and Phi-4-mini models using GoEmotions and Civil Comments datasets. Our results demonstrate consistent improvements across all evaluation metrics: Semantic Softmax substantially reduces Expected Calibration Error (ECE) and Brier Score, while simultaneously enhancing discriminative performance in terms of AUROC and Macro-F1. By accounting for linguistic nuances, our method provides a more calibrated and accurate alternative for zero-shot classification.

The Silent Vote: Improving Zero-Shot LLM Reliability by Aggregating Semantic Neighborhoods

Large Language Models (LLMs) are trained on web-scale corpora, increasing the risk that benchmark test data appears in training sets and inflates reported performance. We present a systematic literature review of 55 studies on LLM benchmark contamination through late 2025. Our contributions are: (1) a four-tier contamination taxonomy (Exact, Syntactic, Semantic, Task-Level; T1–T4); (2) a comparative analysis of five detection families (string-matching, likelihood-based, membership inference, LLM-prompted detection, and benchmark auditing), including access assumptions and failure modes; (3) a synthesis of contamination evidence on MMLU, GSM8K, HumanEval, and HellaSwag by measurement construct; (4) a comparative evaluation of mitigation strategies across lifecycle points, access assumptions, and evidence maturity; and (5) a Contamination Transparency Card (CTC) framework for future releases. Across studies, no detection method is consistently reliable across contamination tiers, model-access settings, and training stages. We identify instruction tuning as a persistent blind spot, note that RL/post-training contamination auditing is only beginning to mature, and report inflation estimates spanning roughly 6%–40% under benchmark- and setting-dependent assumptions.

Are LLM Benchmarks Already Contaminated? A Systematic Review of Contamination Detection Methods

Language models (LMs) are known to be prone to response biases, which present as option preference biases in fixed-response questions. It is therefore imperative to develop low-cost and effective response bias correction methods to improve LM performance and enable more accurate evaluations of model abilities. Here, we propose a simple response bias correction strategy, $\texttt{RBCorr}$, and test it on 12 open-weight language models using yes-no, entailment, and multiple choice questions. We show that response bias is prevalent in LMs pre-correction and that $\texttt{RBCorr}$ effectively eliminates bias and boosts model performance. We also explore the generalizability of bias behavior across models, datasets, and prompt formats, showing that LogProbs-based correction is highly dependent on all three of these aspects. Overall, $\texttt{RBCorr}$ is an easy-to-use method that can boost the performance of smaller LMs and ensure that LM performance on closed-response benchmarks aligns more closely with their true capabilities.

RBCorr: Response Bias Correction in Language Models

Tokenization is central to modern language models, yet its effects on cross-script efficiency, input cost, and truncation behavior remain underexplored. We study this issue through aligned comparisons of Urdu and Roman Urdu, asking whether semantically equivalent content incurs systematically different tokenization costs across scripts. We introduce Token Cost Inequality (TCI), a metric for quantifying relative tokenization efficiency under semantic alignment, and propose a multi-axis framework spanning token cost, fragmentation, and fixed-budget retention. Across three tokenizer families (cl100k, mT5, and ByT5), we find that tokenization disparities are strongly tokenizer-dependent, with substantial differences in token cost and segmentation behavior across scripts. We further identify an efficiency-retention paradox: token cost alone does not fully explain truncation behavior. Under fixed token budgets, Roman Urdu preserves more character-level content than native Urdu, reflecting differences in character-per-token density and fragmentation. Lightweight normalization yields minimal gains, suggesting that the observed disparities arise primarily from tokenizer design rather than superficial orthographic variation. These findings provide controlled evidence that fixed token budgets can produce unequal surface-coverage conditions across scripts, with implications for input-side cost estimation, benchmark design, and multilingual evaluation under constrained token budgets.

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