Morocco

Multi-agent debate – multiple instances of large language models discussing problems in turn-based interaction – has shown promise for solving knowledge and reasoning tasks. However, these methods show limitations when solving complex problems that require longer reasoning chains. We analyze how multi-agent debate drifts away from the initial problem over multiple turns, thus harming task performance. We define this phenomenon as problem drift and quantify its presence across ten tasks (i.e., three generative, three knowledge, three reasoning, and one instruction-following task). We find that generative tasks drift often due to the subjectivity of the answer space (76-89%), compared to high-complexity tasks (7-21%). To identify the reasons, eight human experts analyze 170 multi-agent debates suffering from problem drift. We find the most common issues related to this drift are the lack of progress (35% of cases), low-quality feedback (26% of cases), and a lack of clarity (25% of cases). We propose DRIFTJudge, an LLM-as-a-judge method, as a first baseline to detect problem drift. We also propose DRIFTPolicy, which mitigates 31% of problem drift cases. Our study is a step toward understanding a key limitation of multi-agent debate, highlighting why longer debates can harm task performance and how problem drift could be addressed.

EACL 2026

Stay Focused: Problem Drift in Multi-Agent Debate

performance degradation

multi-agent debate

evaluation

We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

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AAAI 2026

We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

poster

#### *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)*<br><br>

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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. 

We investigate the robustness of fine-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) for the task of Natural Language Inference (NLI), finding that the in-distribution gains from fine-tuning correspond to a large drop in out-of-distribution (OOD) performance. Despite the widespread use of closed-source LLMs, there are no robustness mitigation methods that work under their API fine-tuning constraints. Existing methods to improve robustness typically require changing the fine-tuning process or large-scale data augmentation, methods that are infeasible or cost prohibitive for closed-source models. To address this, we propose strategically selecting the NLI fine-tuning data, prioritising more complex examples or replacing existing training examples with LLM-generated data. Prioritising more complex training examples improves performance on challenging OOD NLI datasets, while training with synthetic data leads to substantial improvements on easier OOD datasets. We find that synthetic examples are often too simple, and by prompting LLMs to create more complex synthetic data we can improve performance on both easy and challenging OOD datasets. Finally, we show that recent autoregressive LLMs are substantially more robust to distributional shifts compared to encoder models, and should be a preferred baseline for future research.

Improving the OOD Performance of Closed-Source LLMs on NLI Through Strategic Data Selection

Coding remains one of the most fundamental modes of interaction between humans and machines. With the rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs), code generation capabilities have begun to significantly reshape programming practices. This development prompts a central question: Have LLMs transformed code style, and how can such transformation be characterized? In this paper, we present a pioneering study that investigates the impact of LLMs on code style, with a focus on naming conventions, complexity, maintainability, and similarity. By analyzing code from over 20,000 GitHub repositories linked to arXiv papers published between 2020 and 2025, we identify measurable trends in the evolution of coding style that align with characteristics of LLM-generated code. For instance, the proportion of snake_case function names in Python code increased from 40.7% in Q1 2023 to 49.8% in Q3 2025. Furthermore, we investigate how LLMs approach algorithmic problems by examining their reasoning processes. Our experimental results provide the first large-scale empirical evidence that LLMs affect real-world programming style.

code_transformed: The Influence of Large Language Models on Code

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have showcased remarkable text generation capabilities. However, due to the inherent ambiguity of natural language and the unstructured nature of text modality, LLMs still struggle to integrate structured information (e.g., graphs) effectively. This hinders their ability to leverage high-quality structured data in specialized domains. Thus, recent research has explored various methods to integrate graph structures into LLMs to improve generation. However, existing methods typically compress the graph's structural information into only a single token, which is concatenated with detailed text tokens for LLMs, restricting their ability to capture deep semantic and structural information. To overcome these limitations, we propose GR aph- A ugmented F ine-grained F usion (GRAFF), a novel method that integrates fine-grained node-level structural information with corresponding text entities to LLMs via a lightweight, structure adapter module. Specifically, we introduce a dual-channel graph input mechanism to separate structural and semantic components for graph encoding, producing more expressive graph representations. We then incorporate a graph attention (GAT) module into LLMs' intermediate decoder layers to process structural information, enhancing the model’s capability in graph-based question answering. Extensive experiments show that GRAFF significantly improves LLMs' graph-understanding ability in question answering, outperforming baselines by an average of 10.14% across four datasets. The official code for this work is available at https://github.com/hcpv/GRAFF.

GRAFF: GRaph-Augmented Fine-grained Fusion for Large Language Models

Multilingual models are widely used for machine translation (MT). However, their effectiveness for extremely low-resource languages (ELRLs) depends critically on how related languages are incorporated during fine-tuning. In this work, we study the role of language mixing directionality, linguistic relatedness, and script compatibility in ELRL translation. We propose SrcMix, a simple source-side mixing strategy that combines related ELRLs during fine-tuning while constraining the decoder to a single target language. Compared to its target-side counterpart TgtMix, SrcMix improves performance by +3 ChrF++ and +5 BLEU in high-resource to ELRL translations, and by +5 ChrF++ and +12 BLEU in mid-resource to ELRL translations. We also release the first Angika MT dataset and provide a systematic comparison of LLM (Aya-101) and NMT (mT5-Large) models under ELRL settings, highlighting the importance of directional mixing and linguistic compatibility.

SrcMix: Mixing of Related Source Languages Benefits Extremely Low-resource Machine Translation

Enterprise AI agents must continuously adapt to maintain accuracy, reduce latency, and remain aligned with user needs. We present a practical implementation of a data flywheel in NVInfo AI, NVIDIA's Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) Knowledge Assistant serving over 30,000 employees. By operationalizing a MAPE-driven data flywheel, we built a closed-loop system that systematically addresses failures in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines and enables continuous learning. Over a 3-month post-deployment period, we monitored feedback and collected 495 negative samples. Analysis revealed two major failure modes: routing errors (5.25\%) and query rephrasal errors (3.2\%). Using NVIDIA NeMo Microservices, we implemented targeted improvements through fine-tuning. For routing, we replaced a Llama 3.1 70B model with a fine-tuned 8B variant, achieving 96\% accuracy, a 10× reduction in model size, and 70\% latency improvement. For query rephrasal, fine-tuning yielded a 3.7\% gain in accuracy and a 40\% latency reduction. Our approach demonstrates how human-in-the-loop (HITL) feedback, when structured within a data flywheel, transforms enterprise AI agents into self-improving systems. Key learnings include approaches to ensure agent robustness despite limited user feedback, navigating privacy constraints, and executing staged rollouts in production. This work offers a repeatable blueprint for building robust, adaptive enterprise AI agents capable of learning from real-world usage at scale.

Adaptive Data Flywheel: Applying MAPE Control Loops to AI Agent Improvement

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) often suffer from hallucinations, particularly errors in object existence, attributes, or relations, which undermine their reliability. We introduce TACO (Verified Atomic Confidence Estimation), a simple framework that mitigates hallucinations through self-verification and confidence calibration without relying on external vision experts. TACO decomposes responses into atomic queries, paraphrases them to reduce sensitivity to wording, and estimates confidence using self-consistency (black-box) or self-confidence (gray-box) aggregation, before refining answers with a language model. Experiments on five benchmarks (POPE, MME, HallusionBench, AMBER, and MM-Hal Bench) with two MLLMs (LLaVA-1.5-7B and CogVLM2) show that TACO consistently outperforms direct prompting and Visual Contrastive Decoding, reduces systematic biases, and improves confidence calibration, demonstrating its effectiveness in enhancing the faithfulness of MLLMs.

Taming Object Hallucinations with Verified Atomic Confidence Estimation

This work presents a comprehensive evaluation of how quantization affects model bias, with particular attention to its impact on individual demographic subgroups. We focus on weight and activation quantization strategies and examine their effects across a broad range of bias types, including stereotypes, fairness, toxicity, and sentiment. We employ both probability- and generated text-based metrics across 13 benchmarks and evaluate models that differ in architecture family and reasoning ability. Our findings show that quantization has a nuanced impact on bias: while it can reduce model toxicity and does not significantly impact sentiment, it tends to slightly increase stereotypes and unfairness in generative tasks, especially under aggressive compression. These trends are generally consistent across demographic categories and subgroups, and model types, although their magnitude depends on the specific setting. Overall, our results highlight the importance of carefully balancing efficiency and ethical considerations when applying quantization in practice.

How Quantization Shapes Bias in Large Language Models

Generative methods have recently gained traction in biological and chemical named entity recognition for their ability to overcome tagging limitations and better capture entity-rich contexts. However, under a few-shot environment, they struggle with the scarcity of annotated data and the structural complexity of biological and chemical entities—particularly nested and discontinuous ones—leading to incorrect recognition and error propagation during generation. To address these challenges, we propose SCoNE, a Self-Correcting and Noise-Augmented Method for Complex Biological and Chemical Named Entity Recognition. Specifically, we introduce a Noise Augmentation Module to enhance training diversity and guide the model to better learn complex entity structures. Besides, we design a Confidence-based Self-Correction Module that identifies low-confidence outputs and revises them to improve generation robustness. Benefiting from these designs, our method outperforms the baselines by 1.80 and 2.73 F1-score on the CHEMDNER and microbial ecology dataset Florilege, highlighting its effectiveness in biological and chemical named entity recognition.

SCoNE: a Self-Correcting and Noise-Augmented Method for Complex Biological and Chemical Named Entity Recognition

Subword tokenization methods, such as Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE), significantly impact the performance and efficiency of large language models (LLMs). The standard approach involves training a general-purpose tokenizer that uniformly processes all textual data during both training and inference. However, the use of a generic set of tokens can incur inefficiencies when applying the model to specific domains or languages. To address this limitation, we propose a post-training adaptation strategy that selectively replaces low-utility tokens with more relevant ones based on their frequency in an adaptation corpus. Our algorithm identifies the token inventory that most effectively encodes the adaptation corpus for a given target vocabulary size. Extensive experiments on generation and classification tasks across multiple languages demonstrate that our adapted tokenizers compress test corpora more effectively than baselines using the same vocabulary size. This method serves as a lightweight adaptation mechanism, akin to a vocabulary fine-tuning process, enabling optimized tokenization for specific domains or tasks.

AdaptBPE: From General Purpose to Specialized Tokenizers

Temporal Knowledge Graphs (TKGs) represent dynamic facts as timestamped relations between entities. While Large Language Models (LLMs) show promise for TKG completion, current approaches typically apply generic pipelines (neighborhood sampling, supervised fine-tuning, uncalibrated inference) without task-specific adaptation to temporal relational reasoning. Through systematic analysis under unified evaluation, we reveal three key failure modes: (1) retrieval strategies miss multi-hop dependencies when target entities are not directly observed in history, (2) standard fine-tuning reinforces memorization over relational generalization, and (3) uncalibrated generation produces contextually implausible entities. We present RECIPE-TKG, a parameter-efficient framework that addresses each limitation through principled, task-specific design: rule-based multi-hop sampling for structural grounding, contrastive fine-tuning to shape relational compatibility, and test-time semantic filtering for contextual alignment. Experiments on four benchmarks show that RECIPE-TKG outperforms prior LLM-based methods across input regimes, achieving up to 22.4% relative improvement in Hits@10, with particularly strong gains when historical evidence is sparse or indirect.

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Improving the OOD Performance of Closed-Source LLMs on NLI Through Strategic Data Selection

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Drift No More? Context Equilibria in Multi-Turn LLM Interactions

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