Morocco

Recent studies have shown that Theory of Mind (ToM) in large language models (LLMs) has not reached human-level performance yet. Since fine-tuning LLMs on ToM datasets often degrades their generalization, several inference-time methods have been proposed to enhance ToM in LLMs. However, existing inference-time methods for ToM are specialized for inferring beliefs from contexts involving changes in the world state. In this study, we present a new inference-time method for ToM, Shoes-of-Others (SoO) prefixing, which makes fewer assumptions about contexts and is applicable to broader scenarios. SoO prefixing simply specifies the beginning of LLM outputs with ``Let&#39;s put ourselves in A&#39;s shoes.&#39;&#39;, where A denotes the target character&#39;s name. We evaluate SoO prefixing on two benchmarks that assess ToM in conversational and narrative contexts without changes in the world state and find that it consistently improves ToM across five categories of mental states. Our analysis suggests that SoO prefixing elicits faithful thoughts, thereby improving the ToM performance.

EACL 2026

Let&#39;s Put Ourselves in Sally&#39;s Shoes: Shoes-of-Others Prefixing Improves Theory of Mind in Large Language Models

large language model

theory of mind

prompting

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Recent studies have shown that Theory of Mind (ToM) in large language models (LLMs) has not reached human-level performance yet. Since fine-tuning LLMs on ToM datasets often degrades their generalization, several inference-time methods have been proposed to enhance ToM in LLMs. However, existing inference-time methods for ToM are specialized for inferring beliefs from contexts involving changes in the world state. In this study, we present a new inference-time method for ToM, Shoes-of-Others (SoO) prefixing, which makes fewer assumptions about contexts and is applicable to broader scenarios. SoO prefixing simply specifies the beginning of LLM outputs with ``Let's put ourselves in A's shoes.'', where A denotes the target character's name. We evaluate SoO prefixing on two benchmarks that assess ToM in conversational and narrative contexts without changes in the world state and find that it consistently improves ToM across five categories of mental states. Our analysis suggests that SoO prefixing elicits faithful thoughts, thereby improving the ToM performance.

Let's Put Ourselves in Sally's Shoes: Shoes-of-Others Prefixing Improves Theory of Mind in Large Language Models

technical paper

#### *Message from the General Chair, Aline Villavicencio*
I’m delighted and honoured to welcome you to the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL 2026), taking place in the beautiful city of Rabat, in Morocco, in March 24-29, 2026. EACL is the flagship European conference of the Association and EACL 2026 proudly continues our field’s tradition of excellence in scholarship, innovation, and inclusivity. I am deeply grateful to the many volunteers whose dedication, generosity, and tireless efforts have made this conference possible.
For the first time EACL is being hosted in the African continent. This is an important milestone for our community, and we are grateful to our Moroccan hosts for enabling this historic moment by bringing this edition of EACL to Rabat. We are also delighted that the Second Arabic NLP School is co-located with EACL. We hope attendees enjoy this wonderful opportunity to strengthen ties with the Computational Linguistics communities across the African continent. *[Read full message](https://drive.google.com/file/d/14NlmHvwM6fPJuMmOvVh7K0vtQbEyv3SZ/view?usp=sharing)* 

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Welcome to the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL). EACL 2026 will be held in Rabat, Morocco, from March 24–29, 2026. 

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong performance across a wide range of NLP tasks. However, they often exhibit suboptimal behaviors and inconsistencies when exposed to unfamiliar external information, underscoring their limitations in effectively leveraging such knowledge. Inspired by constructivist learning theory, we propose ThinkNote, a novel framework that enhances the external knowledge utilization of LLMs through a two-stage constructivist cognitive modeling process. Specifically, ThinkNote performs knowledge assimilation to align new information with the model's parametric memory, forming a coherent internal representation. It then applies thought accommodation to adapt internal reasoning, thereby promoting more consistent and reliable outputs. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that ThinkNote achieves a 10% improvement over strong baseline methods on various question-answering benchmarks. Further analysis indicates that ThinkNote effectively integrates and utilizes external knowledge to help LLMs generate accurate responses and improves their self-consistency. All data and code will be publicly available on GitHub.

ThinkNote: Enhancing Knowledge Integration and Utilization of Large Language Models via Constructivist Cognition Modeling

Language Models (LMs) are increasingly challenging the dominance of domain-specific models, such as Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and Graph Transformers (GTs), in graph learning tasks. Following this trend, we propose a novel approach that empowers off-the-shelf LMs to achieve performance comparable to state-of-the-art (SOTA) GNNs on node classification tasks, without requiring any architectural modifications. By preserving the LM's original architecture, our approach retains a key benefit of LM instruction tuning: the ability to jointly train on diverse datasets, fostering greater flexibility and efficiency. To achieve this, we introduce two key augmentation strategies: (1) Enriching LMs' input using topological and semantic retrieval methods, which provide richer contextual information, and (2) guiding the LMs' classification process through a lightweight GNN classifier that effectively prunes class candidates. Our experiments on real-world datasets show that backbone Flan-T5 LMs equipped with these augmentation strategies outperform SOTA text-output node classifiers and are comparable to top-performing vector-output node classifiers. By bridging the gap between specialized node classifiers and general LMs, this work paves the way for more versatile and widely applicable graph learning models. We will open-source the code upon publication.

How to Make LMs Strong Node Classifiers?

Training large language models with data collected from various domains can improve their performance on downstream tasks. However, given a fixed training budget, the sampling proportions of these different domains significantly impact the model’s performance. How can we determine the domain weights across different data domains to train the best-performing model within constrained computational resources? In this paper, we provide a comprehensive overview of existing data mixture methods. First, we propose a fine-grained categorization of existing methods, extending beyond the previous offline and online classification. Offline methods are further grouped into heuristic-based, algorithm-based, and function fitting-based methods. For online methods, we categorize them into three groups—online min-max optimization, online mixing law, and other approaches—by drawing connections with the optimization frameworks underlying offline methods. Second, we summarize the problem formulations, representative algorithms for each subtype of offline and online methods, and clarify the relationships and distinctions among them. Finally, we discuss the advantages and disadvantages of each method and highlight key challenges in the field of data mixture.

Rethinking Data Mixture for Large Language Models: A Comprehensive Survey and New Perspectives

Preserving privacy in sensitive data while pretraining large language models on small, domain-specific corpora presents a significant challenge. To address this, we propose an entity-based method that preserves personally identifiable information (PII) by synthesizing high-quality encrypted data using a weighted graph. This enables LLMs to encode new knowledge within their parameters by continual pretraining on encrypted synthetic data while granting authorized access to sensitive data through decryption keys. Our results show that they outperform base models and ensure PII security, while encrypted models perform slightly worse than those trained on unencrypted synthetic data. Incorporating a larger number of entities and leveraging the weighted graph in data synthesis improves LLM performance. Furthermore, encrypted models maintain instruction-following abilities with long retrieved contexts. This approach offers an effective solution for privacy-preserving pretraining in domain-specific applications, ensuring both security and utility.

Continual Pretraining on Encrypted Synthetic Data for Privacy-Preserving LLMs

Large Language Models (LLMs) are expected to generate appropriate responses while adhering to predefined prior constraints or knowledge, such as user personas, across various dialogue scenarios. However, real-world interactions frequently involve semantic conflicts between such prior information and actual user-provided inputs. Despite this, prior studies on persona-grounded dialogue—one of the representative tasks in personal preference modeling—have predominantly assumed idealized scenarios where persona and user utterances are fully aligned. To bridge this gap, we introduce and formalize the notion of persona conflict, wherein predefined personas contradict the personal information expressed by the user during interaction. We present a systematic verification framework to examine model behavior under such conflict scenarios. In detail, we propose a taxonomy that categorizes model behaviors into three distinct response types (adhering, sycophantic, and wavering) and develop a measurement schema grounded in this taxonomy. Our study provides a comprehensive analysis of the persona conflict phenomenon, identifying diverse key behavioral factors. Extensive experiments and in-depth analysis provide new insights into designing robust dialogue models capable of managing persona inconsistencies.

I Know, but I Don't Know! How Persona Conflict Undermines Instruction Adherence in Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have been widely deployed in Conversational AIs (CAIs), while exposing privacy and security threats. Recent research shows that LLM-based CAIs can be manipulated to extract private information from human users, posing serious security threats. However, the methods proposed in that study rely on a white-box setting that adversaries can directly modify the system prompt. This condition is unlikely to hold in real-world deployments. The limitation raises a critical question: can unprivileged attackers still induce such privacy risks in practical LLM-integrated applications? To address this question, we propose VortexPIA, a novel indirect prompt injection attack that induces privacy extraction in LLM-integrated applications under black-box settings. By injecting token-efficient data containing false memories, VortexPIA misleads LLMs to actively request private information in batches. Unlike prior methods, VortexPIA allows attackers to flexibly define multiple categories of sensitive data. We evaluate VortexPIA on six LLMs, covering both traditional and reasoning LLMs, across four benchmark datasets. The results show that VortexPIA significantly outperforms baselines and achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance. It also demonstrates efficient privacy requests, reduced token consumption, and enhanced robustness against defense mechanisms. We further validate VortexPIA on multiple realistic open-source LLM-integrated applications, demonstrating its practical effectiveness.

VortexPIA: Indirect Prompt Injection Attack against LLMs for Efficient Extraction of User Privacy

Speculative Decoding (SD) has emerged as a widely used paradigm to accelerate the inference of large language models (LLMs) without compromising generation quality. It works by efficiently drafting multiple tokens using a compact model and then verifying them in parallel using the target LLM. Notably, Self-Speculative Decoding proposes skipping certain layers to construct the draft model, which eliminates the need for additional parameters or training. Despite its strengths, we observe in this work that drafting with layer skipping exhibits significant sensitivity to domain shifts, leading to a substantial drop in acceleration performance. To enhance the domain generalizability of this paradigm, we introduce KNN-SSD, an algorithm that leverages K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) search to match different skipped layers with various domain inputs. We evaluated our algorithm in various models and multiple tasks, observing that its application leads to 1.3x 1.6x speedup in LLM inference.

KNN-SSD: Enabling Dynamic Self-Speculative Decoding via Nearest Neighbor Layer Set Optimization

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly embedded in Computer Science (CS) classrooms to automate code generation, feedback, and assessment. However, their susceptibility to adversarial or ill-intentioned prompts threatens student learning and academic integrity. To cope with this important issue, we evaluate existing off-the-shelf LLMs in handling unsafe and irrelevant prompts within the domain of CS education. We identify important shortcomings in existing LLM guardrails which motivates us to propose CodeGuard, a comprehensive guardrail framework for educational AI systems. CodeGuard includes (i) a first-of-its-kind taxonomy for classifying prompts; (ii) the CodeGuard dataset, a collection of 8,000 prompts spanning the taxonomy; and (iii) PromptShield, a lightweight sentence-encoder model fine-tuned to detect unsafe prompts in real time. Experiments show that PromptShield achieves 0.93 F1 score, surpassing existing guardrail methods. Additionally, further experimentation reveals that CodeGuard reduces potentially harmful or policy-violating code completions by 30-65% without degrading performance on legitimate educational tasks. The code, datasets, and evaluation scripts are made freely available to the community.

CodeGuard: Improving LLM Guardrails in CS Education

The performance of large language models (LLMs) tends to degrade for extremely low-resource languages, primarily due to the lack of labeled training data. Despite growing interest, the availability of high-quality natural language processing (NLP) datasets for these languages remains limited. This paper addresses such gap by focusing on Ladin, an endangered Romance language, specifically the Val Badia variant. Leveraging a small set of parallel LadinвЂ“Italian sentence pairs, we create synthetic datasets for sentiment analysis and question answering by translating monolingual Italian data. To ensure linguistic quality, we apply rigorous filtering and back-translation procedures in our method. We further demonstrate that incorporating these synthetic datasets into machine translation training leads to substantial improvements over existing ItalianвЂ“Ladin translation baselines. Our contributions include sentiment analysis and question answering datasets for Ladin, establishing foundational resources that support broader NLP research and downstream applications for underrepresented languages.

Towards the First NLP Benchmark for Ladin - an Extremely Low-Resource Language

Activation steering or editing hidden states to control language-model behavior can be framed as a causal mediation problem: inputs induce internal activations, a subset of which act as mediators transmitting targeted behaviors to outputs. We formalize a structural graph over transformer layers and derive front-door—style identification conditions that justify steering through mediating subspaces while preserving non-mediating features, thereby reducing confounding and off-target effects. Within this mediation-first view, we present CAS-BiPO, a sparse mediation steering approach that learns targeted behavioral interventions via regularized training. Empirically, our method achieves 97-100% of dense baseline effectiveness across four behavioral control tasks while using only 10-30% of activation dimensions. Learned masks concentrate 94.3% of steering effects in 26.7% of dimensions, with neurons exhibiting 2.2 x higher activation changes, validating the sparse mediation hypothesis. Our causal framework provides theoretical grounding while CAS-BiPO demonstrates that end-to-end learning of interpretable, reliable interventions is both feasible and advantageous.

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ThinkNote: Enhancing Knowledge Integration and Utilization of Large Language Models via Constructivist Cognition Modeling

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Probing the Robustness of Theory of Mind in Large Language Models

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