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This paper reveals a novel linear characteristic exclusive to transformer decoders, including models like GPT, LLaMA, OPT, BLOOM and others. We analyze embedding transformations between sequential layers, uncovering an almost perfect linear relationship (Procrustes similarity score of 0.99). However, linearity decreases when the residual component is removed, due to a consistently low transformer layer output norm. Our experiments show that pruning or linearly approximating some of the layers does not impact loss or model performance significantly. Moreover, we introduce a cosine-similarity-based regularization in our pretraining experiments on smaller models, aimed at reducing layer linearity. This regularization not only improves performance metrics on benchmarks like Tiny Stories and SuperGLUE but as well successfully decreases the linearity of the models. This study challenges the existing understanding of transformer architectures, suggesting that their operation may be more linear than previously assumed.

ACL 2024

Your Transformer is Secretly Linear

linearity

feature space

regularization

pruning

transformer

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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ACL 2026

The 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026) will take place in San Diego, California, from July 2 - 7, 2026.

poster

### Welcome!
The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. Our Virtual Poster Sessions will take place online Thursday, August 22, 2024.

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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.

This work explores whether language models encode meaningfully grounded representations of sounds of objects. We learn a linear probe that retrieves the correct text representation of an object given a snippet of audio related to that object, where the sound representation is given by a pretrained audio model. This probe is trained via a contrastive loss that pushes the language representations and sound representations of an object to be close to one another. After training, the probe is tested on its ability to generalize to objects that were not seen during training. Across different language models and audio models, we find that the probe generalization is above chance in many cases, indicating that despite being trained only on raw text, language models encode grounded knowledge of sounds for some objects.

What Do Language Models Hear? Probing for Auditory Representations in Language Models

Recent work shows that in-context learning and optimization of in-context examples (ICE) can significantly improve the accuracy of large language models (LLMs) on a wide range of tasks, leading to an apparent consensus that ICE optimization is crucial for better performance. However, most of these studies assume a fixed or no instruction provided in the prompt. We challenge this consensus by investigating the necessity of optimizing ICE when task-specific instructions are provided and find that there are many tasks for which it yields diminishing returns. In particular, using a diverse set of tasks and a systematically created instruction set with gradually added details, we find that as the prompt instruction becomes more detailed, the returns on ICE optimization diminish. To characterize this behavior, we introduce a task-specific metric called Normalized Invariability to Choice of Examples (NICE) that quantifies the learnability of tasks from a given instruction, and provides a heuristic to help decide whether to optimize instructions or ICE for a new task. 
Given a task, the proposed metric can reliably predict the utility of optimizing ICE compared to using random ICE. Our code is available at [https://github.com/microsoft/nice-icl](https://github.com/microsoft/nice-icl).

NICE: To Optimize In-Context Examples or Not?

We present the first domain-adapted and fully-trained large language model, RecGPT-7B, and its instruction-following variant, RecGPT-7B-Instruct, for text-based recommendation. Experimental results on rating prediction and sequential recommendation tasks show that our model, RecGPT-7B-Instruct, outperforms previous strong baselines. We are releasing our RecGPT models as well as their pre-training and fine-tuning datasets to facilitate future research and downstream applications in text-based recommendation. Public "huggingface" links to our RecGPT models and datasets are available at: https://github.com/VinAIResearch/RecGPT

RecGPT: Generative Pre-training for Text-based Recommendation

Pairwise Ranking Prompting (PRP) demonstrates impressive effectiveness in zero-shot document re-ranking tasks with large language models (LLMs). However, in the existing methods, PRP only outputs the same label for the comparison results of different confidence intervals without considering the uncertainty of pairwise comparison, which implies an underutilization of the generation probability information of LLMs. To bridge this gap, we propose PRP-Graph, a novel pairwise re-ranking approach, based on a refined scoring PRP unit that exploits the output probabilities of target labels to capture the degree of certainty of the comparison results. Specifically, the PRP-Graph consists of two stages, namely ranking graph construction and ranking graph aggregation. Extensive experiments conducted on the BEIR benchmark demonstrate the superiority of our approach over existing PRP-based methods. Comprehensive analysis reveals that the PRP-Graph displays strong robustness towards the initial ranking order and delivers exceptional re-ranking results with acceptable efficiency. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/Memelank/PRP-Graph.

PRP-Graph: Pairwise Ranking Prompting to LLMs with Graph Aggregation for Effective Text Re-ranking

The swift detection of multimedia fake news has emerged as a crucial task in combating malicious propaganda and safeguarding the security of the online environment. While existing methods have achieved commendable results in modeling entity-level inconsistency, addressing event-level inconsistency following the inherent subject-predicate logic of news and robustly learning news representations from poor-quality news samples remain two challenges. In this paper, we propose an Event-diven fake news detection framework (Event-Radar) based on multi-view learning, which integrates visual manipulation, textual emotion and multimodal inconsistency at event-level for fake news detection. Specifically, leveraging the capability of graph structures to capture interactions between events and parameters, Event-Radar captures event-level multimodal inconsistency by constructing an event graph that includes multimodal entity subject-predicate logic. Additionally, to mitigate the interference of poor-quality news, Event-Radar introduces a multi-view fusion mechanism, learning comprehensive and robust representations by computing the credibility of each view as a clue, thereby detecting fake news. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Event-Radar achieves outstanding performance on three large-scale fake news detection benchmarks. Our studies also confirm that Event-Radar exhibits strong robustness, providing a paradigm for detecting fake news from noisy news samples.

Event-Radar: Event-driven Multi-View Learning for Multimodal Fake News Detection

In reasoning tasks, even a minor error can cascade into inaccurate results, leading to suboptimal performance of large language models in
such domains. Earlier fine-tuning approaches sought to mitigate this by leveraging more precise supervisory signals from human labeling, larger models, or self-sampling, although at a high cost. Conversely, we develop a method that avoids external resources, relying instead on introducing perturbations to the input. Our training approach randomly masks certain tokens within the chain of thought, a technique
we found to be particularly effective for reasoning tasks. When applied to fine-tuning with GSM8K on Llama-2-7B, this method achieved
a 5% improvement in GSM8K accuracy and a 10% improvement in GSM-IC accuracy over standard supervised fine-tuning with a few codes modified. Furthermore, it is complementary to existing methods. When integrated with related explicit data augmentation methods, it leads to improvements across five datasets of various augmentation methods, as well as two different base models. We further investigate the mechanisms behind this improvement through case studies and quantitative analysis, suggesting that our approach may provide superior support for the model in capturing long-distance dependencies, especially those related to questions. This enhancement could deepen understanding of the premises in questions and prior steps.

Masked Thought: Simply Masking Partial Reasoning Steps Can Improve Mathematical Reasoning Learning of Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) can explain their predictions through post-hoc or Chain-of-Thought (CoT) explanations. But an LLM could make up reasonably sounding explanations that are unfaithful to its underlying reasoning. Recent work has designed tests that aim to judge the faithfulness of post-hoc or CoT explanations. In this work we argue that these faithfulness tests do not measure faithfulness to the models' inner workings -- but rather their self-consistency at output level.
Our contributions are three-fold: i) We clarify the status of faithfulness tests in view of model explainability, characterising them as self-consistency tests instead. This assessment we underline by ii) constructing a Comparative Consistency Bank for self-consistency tests that for the first time compares existing tests on a common suite of 11 open LLMs and 5 tasks -- including iii) our new self-consistency measure CC-SHAP. CC-SHAP is a fine-grained measure (not a test) of LLM self-consistency. It compares how a model's input contributes to the predicted answer and to generating the explanation. Our fine-grained CC-SHAP metric allows us iii) to compare LLM behaviour when making predictions and to analyse the effect of other consistency tests at a deeper level, which takes us one step further towards measuring faithfulness by bringing us closer to the internals of the model than strictly surface output-oriented tests.

On Measuring Faithfulness or Self-consistency of Natural Language Explanations

Instruction Fine-tuning (IFT) is a crucial phase in building large language models (LLMs). Previous works mainly focus on the IFT's role in the transfer of behavioral norms and the learning of additional world knowledge. However, the understanding of the underlying mechanisms of IFT remains significantly limited. In this paper, we design a knowledge intervention framework to decouple the potential underlying factors of IFT, thereby enabling individual analysis of different factors. Surprisingly, our experiments reveal that attempting to learn additional world knowledge through IFT often struggles to yield positive impacts and can even lead to markedly negative effects. Further, we discover that maintaining internal knowledge consistency before and after IFT is a critical factor for achieving successful IFT. Our findings reveal the underlying mechanisms of IFT and provide robust support for some very recent and potential future works.

Learning or Self-aligning? Rethinking Instruction Fine-tuning

Recent progress in LLMs discussion suggests that multi-agent discussion improves the reasoning abilities of LLMs. In this work, we reevaluate this claim through systematic experiments, where we propose a novel group discussion framework to enrich the set of discussion mechanisms. Interestingly, our results show that a single-agent LLM with strong prompts can achieve almost the same best performance as the best existing discussion approach on a wide range of reasoning tasks and backbone LLMs. We observed that the multi-agent discussion performs better than a single agent only when there is no demonstration in the prompt. Further study reveals the common interaction mechanisms of LLMs during the discussion. Our code can be found in \url{https://github.com/HKUST-KnowComp/LLM-discussion}.

Rethinking the Bounds of LLM Reasoning: Are Multi-Agent Discussions the Key?

While auxiliary information has become a key to enhancing Large Language Models (LLMs), relatively little is known about how LLMs merge these contexts, specifically contexts generated by LLMs and those retrieved from external sources.
To investigate this, we formulate a systematic framework to identify whether LLMs' responses are attributed to either generated or retrieved contexts.
To easily trace the origin of the response, we construct datasets with conflicting contexts, i.e., each question is paired with both generated and retrieved contexts, yet only one of them contains the correct answer.
Our experiments reveal a significant bias in several LLMs (GPT-4/3.5 and Llama2) to favor generated contexts, even when they provide incorrect information.
We further identify two key factors contributing to this bias: i) contexts generated by LLMs typically show greater similarity to the questions, increasing their likelihood of being selected; ii) the segmentation process used in retrieved contexts disrupts their completeness, thereby hindering their full utilization in LLMs.
Our analysis enhances the understanding of how LLMs merge diverse contexts, offers valuable insights for advancing current LLM augmentation methods, and highlights the risk of generated misinformation for retrieval-augmented LLMs.

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What Do Language Models Hear? Probing for Auditory Representations in Language Models

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