Morocco

Subliminal learning is a recently observed phenomenon in which a student model acquires behavioral traits from a teacher by fine-tuning on teacher-generated data that contains no explicit mention of those traits. This is surprising because the setup resembles hard knowledge distillation: the student only sees the teacher’s final tokens rather than soft probability targets. In this work, we provide a systematic empirical study of subliminal learning in language models, focusing on its generality, sensitivity to training conditions and system prompts, and the adequacy of token-level explanations as underlying mechanisms. We reproduce the subliminal learning pipeline across multiple model families, finding that the phenomenon is model-dependent and not general. We then characterize how transfer strength varies with dataset size, dataset diversity, and fine-tuning time. We also study the stability of transferred traits under multiple rounds of distillation as well as the transfer of multiple traits at once, where stronger traits tend to dominate. Finally, we test token-level accounts, using token entanglement as a representative hypothesis. We find that specific tokens do not standalone carry trait-specific information, suggesting that token-level explanations alone are incomplete. Together, our results delineate key boundary conditions for subliminal learning and motivate further work toward a mechanistic account of how traits are encoded in seemingly unrelated data. The code for our experiments is available at Github Repository: https://github.com/YagneshV/subliminal-learning-codebase.

EACL 2026

Understanding Subliminal Learning: Generality, Sensitivity, and Token-Level Explanations

subliminal learning

interpretability

knowledge distillation

language models

#### *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. 

poster

This research proposal describes a cross-disciplinary project aimed at developing Digital Twins (DTs) of Alzheimer's Disease (AD) using Language Models (LMs). By mimicking the functional deficits observed in individuals with AD, these DTs will serve as tools for early detection and understanding of disease progression. Several approaches to altering the LM will be explored, and the resulting effects on brain score — an evaluation of the correlation between brain activity and the LM's internal activations — will be studied. Detection models will be trained based on each approach; these models will be compared against themselves and the state-of-the-art.

Two converging lines of evidence motivate this work: LMs achieve high accuracy in classifying AD from speech transcripts, and their internal representations correlate significantly with human brain activity during language processing. If successful, this project could lead to significant advancements in the early detection and monitoring of AD, ultimately improving patient outcomes.

Thesis proposal: COGNILENS: Analyzing Cognitive Decline in Language Models for Alzheimer's Monitoring

This thesis argues that the currently widely used Natural Language Processing algorithms possibly have various limitations related to the properties of the texts they handle and produce. With the wide adoption of these tools in rapid progress, we must ask what these limitations are and what are the possible implications of integrating such tools into our daily lives.

As a testbed, we have chosen the task of Neural Machine Translation (NMT). Nevertheless, we aim for general insights and outcomes, applicable to current Large Language Models (LLMs). We ask whether the algorithms used in NMT have inherent inductive biases that are beneficial for most types of inputs but might harm the processing of untypical texts, thereby contributing to a cycle of monotonous, repetitive language -- whether generated by machines or humans.
To explore this hypothesis, we define a set of measures to quantify text diversity based on its statistical properties, like uniformity or rhythmicity of word-level surprisal, on multiple scales (sentence, discourse, language). We conduct a series of experiments to investigate whether NMT systems struggle with maintaining the diversity of such texts, potentially reducing the richness of the generated language, compared to human translators.

We further analyze potential origins of these limitations within existing training objectives and decoding strategies. Ultimately, our goal is to propose and validate alternative approaches (e.g., loss functions, decoding algorithms) that maintain the diversity and complexity of language and that allow for better global planning of the output generation, enabling the models to better reflect the ambiguities inherent in human communication.

Thesis proposal: Are We Losing Textual Diversity to Natural Language Processing?

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have notably enhanced task-oriented dialogue systems, particularly in Dialogue State Tracking (DST), owing to their generative capabilities and strong generalization. Although recent approaches such as LDST and FnCTOD significantly improved cross-domain DST performance via supervised fine-tuning (SFT), these methods typically require substantial amounts of domain-specific data. In this paper, we address this limitation by employing Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) - a critic-free reinforcement learning method that efficiently guides LLMs toward improved DST accuracy even under low-resource conditions. Our results on established DST benchmarks, including MultiWOZ 2.1 and 2.4, demonstrate that the RL approach achieves superior performance to existing methods while using significantly reduced out-of-domain training data. In addition, we found out that models pretrained specifically for tool-use tasks can be a better starting point, especially on small scales.

Call, Reward, Repeat: Advancing Dialog State Tracking with GRPO and Function Calling

Detecting personally identifiable information (PII) in user queries is critical for ensuring privacy in question-answering systems. Current approaches mainly redact all PII, disregarding the fact that some of them may be contextually relevant to the user’s question, resulting in a degradation of response quality. Large language models (LLMs) might be able to help determine which PII are relevant, but due to their closed source nature and lack of privacy guarantees, they are unsuitable for sensitive data processing. To achieve privacy-preserving PII detection, we propose CAPID, a practical approach that fine-tunes a locally owned small language model (SLM) that filters sensitive information before it is passed to LLMs for QA. However, existing datasets do not capture the context-dependent relevance of PII needed to train such a model effectively. To fill this gap, we propose a synthetic data generation pipeline that leverages LLMs to produce a diverse, domain-rich dataset spanning multiple PII types and relevance levels. Using this dataset, we fine-tune an SLM to detect PII spans, classify their types, and estimate contextual relevance. Our experiments show that relevance-aware PII detection with a fine-tuned SLM substantially outperforms existing baselines in span, relevance and type accuracy while preserving significantly higher downstream utility under anonymization.

CAPID: Context-Aware PII Detection for Question-Answering Systems

Music is a universal cultural practice that influences emotion, ritual and creativity, and it is now represented in many digital modalities: audio recordings, symbolic encodings (MIDI, MusicXML, ABC), visual scores and lyrics. Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have the ambition to process "everything", including music, and therefore promise to support musical analysis, creation and education. Despite this promise, systematic methods for evaluating whether a MLLM understands music are missing. Existing music‑focused benchmarks are fragmented, largely single‑modality, Western‑centric, and often do not require actual perception of the musical content; methodological details such as prompt design and answer‑extraction are frequently omitted or not discussed, and some evaluations rely on proprietary LLMs, hindering reproducibility and raising concerns about test‑data leakage. To fill this gap, this dissertation proposes to design a musically multimodal benchmark built on a transparent, fully open evaluation pipeline. The benchmark will present closed‑question‑answer items across four musical modalities, employ carefully engineered distractor options to enforce genuine perceptual engagement, and follow rigorously documented prompt‑selection and answer‑extraction procedures. It will further incorporate culturally diverse musical material beyond the dominant Western canon. Guided by three research questions: (1) how to devise robust, reproducible evaluation procedures, (2) how current MLLMs perform across modalities, and (3) how model scores relate to human musical abilities; the benchmark will enable precise diagnosis of model limitations, inform the development of more musically aware AI systems, and provide a principled basis for assessing practical usefulness to musicians and other stakeholders in the creative industry.

Thesis Proposal: Multimodal Benchmark for Music Understanding in Large Language Models

In-image machine translation is a sub-task of Image-Based Machine Translation that aims to substitute text embedded in images with its translation into another language. In the current work, we define a simple task with a synthetic dataset based on rendering parallel text over a plain background. Furthermore, we experiment with different optical character recognition, machine translation and image synthesis models to include in our ensemble. Then, we present our cascade approach as a pipeline that obtains the transcript of the original image, translates it, and generates a new image (image synthesis) similar to the original one. Finally, we compare the performance of our approach with several current state-of-the-art models, including an end-to-end approach, demonstrating its competitiveness.

In-Image Machine Translation. A Preliminary Modular Approach

This study proposes a method for learning subword correspondences in parallel sentence pairs using the EM algorithm. Conventional neural machine translation typically employs subword segmentation models trained. However, since existing methods do not consider parallel relationships, inconsistencies in word segmentation between source and target languages may hinder translation model training. Our approach leverages direct modeling of subword correspondences in parallel corpora, thereby improving segmentation consistency across languages. Experiments across multiple machine translation tasks confirm that our proposed method improves translation accuracy for many tasks.

Probabilistic Bilingual Subword Segmentation with Latent Subword Alignment

Lyrics translation must account for rhythm, rhyme, and singability in the translated lyrics. In this study, we focus on singability and investigate effective prompting methods for translating singable lyrics, including verification-guided and multi-round prompting, applied to large language models. First, we curate a multilingual lyrics translation dataset covering a total of six language directions across Chinese, Japanese, and English. Next, we evaluate seven prompting strategies, with instruction complexity increasing incrementally. The results show that multi-prompt strategies improve singability-related aspects, such as rhythmic alignment and phonological naturalness, compared to naive translation. Furthermore, human evaluations using songs created from translated lyrics suggest that moderately complex prompting strategies improve singable naturalness, while more complex strategies contribute to greater stability in perceived quality.

Towards Singable Lyrics Translation Using Large Language Models

Most vision-language models (VLMs) are trained on English-centric data, limiting their performance in other languages and cultural contexts. This restricts their usability for non-English-speaking users and hinders the development of multimodal systems that reflect diverse linguistic and cultural realities. In this work, we reproduce and adapt the LLaVA-Next methodology to create a set of Polish VLMs. We rely on a fully automated pipeline for translating and filtering existing multimodal datasets, and complement this with synthetic Polish data for OCR and culturally specific tasks. Despite relying almost entirely on automatic translation and minimal manual intervention, our approach yields strong results: we observe a +9.5 pp improvement over LLaVA‑1.6‑Vicuna‑13B on a Polish-adapted MMBench, along with higher-quality captions in generative evaluations, as measured by human annotators in terms of linguistic correctness. These findings highlight that large-scale automated translation, combined with lightweight filtering, can effectively bootstrap high-quality multimodal models for low-resource languages. Some challenges remain, particularly in cultural coverage and evaluation. To facilitate further research, we release our models, code, and datasets.

Annotation-Efficient Vision-Language Model Adaptation to the Polish Language Using the LLaVA Framework

This thesis investigates how polyvocal ontologies and Large Language Model (LLM) based Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) can operationalize perspective-aware knowledge extraction, preserving conflicting stakeholder interpretations as epistemically separable, queryable Knowledge Graphs (KGs). Current AI systems consolidate multiple perspectives into singular, decontextualized schemas, introducing representational bias and information loss. We propose a systematic framework addressing three interconnected research questions: (1) how to generate polyvocal ontology design patterns for high-stakes domains; (2) how to architect LLM-based MAS that extract perspective-conditioned facts while maintaining schema coherence and provenance traceability; and (3) whether such extractions achieve semantic diversity without sacrificing KG integrity. Evaluation is proposed on medical datasets, conducted with domain experts, to demonstrate the feasibility of perspective-aware extraction as a principled alternative to consensus-oriented KGs. Expected contributions include polyvocal ontology patterns, an ontology-orchestrated MAS extraction framework with auditable provenance, and empirical validation.

Next from EACL 2026

Thesis proposal: COGNILENS: Analyzing Cognitive Decline in Language Models for Alzheimer's Monitoring

Similar lecture

You Didn't Have to Say It Like That: Subliminal Learning from Faithful Paraphrases

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