United States

While mechanistic interpretability (MI) has produced important insights into neural network internals, the field has yet to establish a standardized system to audit experiments. As such, many of its findings remain underutilized in safety-critical applications such as medical AI and autonomous systems, as stakeholders cannot certify their validity. Recent work demonstrates this concretely: two papers found conflicting conclusions for the same behavior, and a third study revealed that both were partially correct but incomparable due to methodological inconsistencies. Without standardized auditing, such ambiguities hinder adoption in high-stakes contexts requiring strong correctness guarantees. We call for the MI community to work towards developing a novel reviewing system that complements peer review via: (1) Continuous reviewing supported by a Collaborative Reviewing Platform where meta-science results and discussions (such as critiques, negative results, post-hoc extensions, reproductions, replications, and partial results) that fit outside of papers are organized and discussed, allowing for comments and revisions to be made at any time (2) Generalizing good practices found on this platform into expert-verified guidelines and protocols to improve auditing efficiency, and (3) Source-based auditing systems that track arguments which claims depend on. This position paper encourages constructive debate over the necessity, design and implementation of such a framework, providing early concrete examples to help catalyze these dialogues. Overall, we propose that auditing MI itself is essential for its application in AI safety, industry, and governance.

ACL 2026

 Make Mechanistic Interpretability Auditable: A Call to Develop Guidelines via Continuous Collaborative Reviewing

#### *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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EACL 2026

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

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.

Improving the exploration of reasoning is essential for advancing Large Language Models' (LLMs) problem-solving performance. Current methods primarily rely on output-level stochasticity, which decode within fixed reasoning patterns of LLM and suffer from insufficient exploration. In this paper, we introduce adjusting attention temperature to directly modulate the model's internal focus during reasoning, which enables a dynamic shift between exploratory and focused processing. We reveal that moderate adjustments preserve LLM's reasoning capability while producing problem hardness-dependent benefits: higher temperatures facilitate solving complex tasks by encouraging wider exploration, whereas lower temperatures mitigate overthinking on simpler problems. Leveraging this insight, we propose a two-stage inference strategy: first, attention temperature scaling modulates the LLM's reasoning patterns to diversify the reasoning traces; then, a difficulty-aware aggregation scheme is introduced to effectively identify the most reliable solution from the generated candidates. 
Extensive evaluations show that our method improves Pass@10 by 6.78--14.20% and aggregation accuracy by 9.74% across 7 reasoning benchmarks.

Thermometer of Thoughts: Enhancing LLM's Exploration via Attention Temperature Modulation

Execution Accuracy (EX), the widely used metric for evaluating the effectiveness of Natural Language to SQL (NL2SQL) solutions, is becoming increasingly unreliable. It is sensitive to syntactic variation, ignores that questions may admit multiple interpretations, and is easily misled by erroneous ground-truth SQL. To address this, we introduce **ROSE**, an intent-centered metric that focuses on whether the predicted SQL answers the question, rather than consistency with the ground-truth SQL under the reference-dependent paradigm. ROSE employs an adversarial Prover-Refuter cascade: SQL Prover assesses the semantic correctness of a predicted SQL against the user's intent independently, while Adversarial Refuter uses the ground-truth SQL as evidence to challenge and refine this judgment. On our expert-aligned validation set **ROSE-VEC**, ROSE achieves the best agreement with human experts, outperforming the next-best metric by nearly 24% in Cohen's Kappa. We also conduct a large-scale re-evaluation of 19 NL2SQL methods, revealing four valuable insights. We release ROSE and ROSE-VEC to facilitate more reliable NL2SQL research.

ROSE: An Intent-Centered Evaluation Metric for NL2SQL

With the growing prevalence of generative AI, an increasing amount of content is no longer exclusively generated by humans but by generative AI models with human guidance. This shift presents notable challenges for the delineation of originality due to the varying degrees of human contribution in AI-assisted works. This study raises the research question of measuring human contribution in AI-assisted content generation and introduces a framework to address this question that is grounded in information theory. By calculating mutual information between human input and AI-assisted output relative to self-information of AI-assisted output, we quantify the proportional information contribution of humans in content generation. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed measure effectively discriminates between varying degrees of human contribution across multiple creative domains. To further enhance real-world applicability, we extend the framework to estimate the minimal necessary human contribution for any text without requiring human input and validate its effectiveness. We hope that this work lays a foundation for measuring human contributions in AI-assisted content generation in the era of generative AI.

Measuring Human Contribution in AI-Assisted Content Generation

*Warmth* (W) (often further broken down into*Trust* (T) and *Sociability* (S)) and *Competence* (C) are central dimensions along which people evaluate individuals and social groups (Fiske, 2018). While these constructs are well established in social psychology, they are only starting to get attention in NLP research through word-level lexicons, which do not fully capture their contextual expression in larger text units and discourse. In this work, we introduce*Warmth and Competence Sentences (W&C-Sent)*, the first sentence-level dataset annotated for warmth and competence. The dataset includes over 1,600 English sentence--target pairs annotated along three dimensions: *trust* and *sociability* (components of *warmth*), and *competence*. The sentences in W&C-Sent are social media posts that express attitudes and opinions about specific individuals or social groups (the targets of our annotations). We describe the data collection, annotation, and quality-control procedures in detail, and evaluate a range of large language models (LLMs) on their ability to identify trust, sociability, and competence in text. W&C-Sent provides a new resource for analyzing warmth and competence in language and supports future research at the intersection of NLP and computational social science.

Annotating Dimensions of Social Perception in Text: A Sentence-Level Dataset of Warmth and Competence

Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) have recently attracted significant attention for their ability to enhance diversity, controllability, and parallelism. However, their non-sequential, bidirectionally masked generation makes quality assessment difficult, underscoring the need for effective self-evaluation. In this work, we propose DiSE, a simple yet effective self-evaluation confidence quantification method for dLLMs. DiSE quantifies confidence by computing the probability of regenerating the tokens in the entire generated sequence, given the full context. This method enables more efficient and reliable quality assessment by leveraging token regeneration probabilities, facilitating both likelihood estimation and robust uncertainty quantification. Building upon DiSE, we further introduce a flexible-length generation framework, which adaptively controls the sequence length based on the model's self-assessment of its own output. We analyze and validate the feasibility of DiSE from the perspective of dLLM generalization, and empirically demonstrate that DiSE is positively correlated with both semantic coherence and answer accuracy. Extensive experiments on likelihood evaluation, uncertainty quantification, and flexible-length generation further confirm the effectiveness of the proposed DiSE.

Efficient Self-Evaluation for Diffusion Language Models via Sequence Regeneration

While Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive proficiency in generating SQL queries, they fundamentally lack the capability to self-evaluate correctness without an execution oracle. This limitation creates a stark Generation-Selection Gap, where high potential accuracy (Pass@K) fails to translate into execution accuracy (Pass@1). Although supervised verifiers offer mitigation, they incur prohibitive annotation costs and suffer from domain fragility. Consequently, recent research has pivoted to the training-free setting. However, existing methods---such as Self-Consistency or LLM-as-a-Judge---remain hampered by systematic bias (consensus on hallucinations) and symbolic blindness (inability to simulate execution states). We introduce DPC (Dual-Paradigm Consistency), a multi-agent framework that reformulates SQL selection from a probabilistic guessing task on hidden data into a deterministic verification task on visible data. Specifically, DPC employs a Slicer and a Tester agent to collaboratively construct a Minimal Distinguishing Database (MDD)---an adversarial, fully observable micro-environment engineered to expose logical discrepancies between candidates. To break the self-correction bias, a Solver agent then verifies the SQL candidates by cross-referencing their execution against a parallel Python/Pandas solution. By validating execution consistency between declarative (SQL) and imperative (Python) paradigms, DPC robustly discriminates correct logic from systematic hallucinations. Experiments on BIRD and Spider across multiple LLMs demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms existing selection baselines, achieving absolute accuracy improvements of up to 2.2% over strong competitors like Self-Consistency.

DPC: Training-Free Text-to-SQL Candidate Selection via Dual-Paradigm Consistency

Tasks such as mathematical problem solving and coding require models to leverage chain-of-thought (CoT) processes, enabling human-like reasoning strategies. However, the advancement of large reasoning models (LRMs) is hindered by the lack of comprehensive CoT datasets. Existing resources often fail to provide extensive reasoning problems with coherent CoT processes distilled from multiple teacher models, and do not account for multifaceted properties describing the internal characteristics of CoTs.
To address these challenges, we introduce OmniThought, a large-scale dataset featuring 2 million CoT processes generated and validated by multiple powerful LRMs. Each CoT process in OmniThought is annotated with novel Reasoning Verbosity (RV) and Cognitive Difficulty (CD) scores, which characterize the appropriateness of CoT verbosity and the cognitive difficulty level for models to comprehend these reasoning processes. We further establish a self-reliant pipeline to curate this dataset. Extensive experiments using Qwen2.5 and Qwen3 of various sizes demonstrate the positive impact of our RV and CD scores on LRM training effectiveness. Based on the OmniThought dataset, we train and release a series of high-performing LRMs with enhanced reasoning abilities and optimized CoT output length. Our contributions advance the development of LRMs across different scales for solving complex reasoning tasks.

Reasoning with OmniThought: A Large CoT Dataset with Verbosity and Cognitive Difficulty Annotations

Continual pre-training on small-scale task-specific data is an effective method for improving large language models in new target fields, yet it risks catastrophic forgetting of their original capabilities. A common solution is to re-weight training data mixtures from source and target fields on a domain space to achieve balanced performance. Previous domain reweighting strategies rely on manual designation with certain heuristics based on human intuition or empirical results. In this work, we prove that more general heuristics can be parameterized by proposing Data Mixing Agent, the first model-based, end-to-end framework that learns to re-weight domains. The agent learns generalizable heuristics through reinforcement learning on large quantities of data mixing trajectories with corresponding feedback from an evaluation environment. Experiments in continual pre-training on math reasoning show that Data Mixing Agent outperforms strong baselines in achieving balanced performance across source and target field benchmarks. Furthermore, it generalizes well across unseen source fields, target models, and domain spaces without retraining. Direct application to the code generation field also indicates its adaptability across target domains. Further analysis showcases the agents' well-aligned heuristics with human intuitions and their efficiency in achieving superior model performance with less source-field data.

 Data Mixing Agent: Learning to Re-weight Domains for Continual Pre-training

Evaluating LLMs' instruction-following ability in multi-topic dialogues is essential yet challenging. Existing benchmarks are limited to a fixed number of turns, susceptible to saturation and failing to account for users' interactive experience. In this work, we propose a novel framework featuring a three-layer tracking mechanism and a query synthesis agent to mimic sequential user behaviors. Grounded in Flow Theory, we introduce process-centric metrics and terminate a conversational evaluation only upon exhausting user patience. Leveraging this framework, we present EvolIF, an evolving benchmark covering 12 constraint groups. Our analysis reveals deficiencies in failure recovery and fine-grained instruction following, with performance stratification becoming evident as conversational depth increases. GPT-5 demonstrates the most sustained resilience, maintaining a 66.40% stability score, outperforming Gemini-3-Pro by 5.59%, while other models lag behind.

One Battle After Another: Probing LLMs' Limits on Multi-Turn Instruction Following with a Benchmark Evolving Framework

Collaboration and information sharing empower Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) but also introduce a critical security risk known as Agent Cascading Injection (ACI). In such attacks, a compromised agent exploits inter-agent trust to propagate malicious instructions, causing cascading failures across the system. However, existing studies consider only limited attack strategies and simplified MAS settings, limiting their generalizability and comprehensive evaluation. To bridge this gap, we introduce ACIArena, a unified framework for evaluating the robustness of MAS. ACIArena offers systematic evaluation suites spanning multiple attack surfaces (i.e., external inputs, agent profiles, inter-agent messages) and attack objectives (i.e., instruction hijacking, task disruption, information exfiltration). Specifically, ACIArena establishes a unified specification that jointly supports MAS construction and attack–defense modules. It covers six widely used MAS implementations and provides a benchmark of 1,356 test cases for systematically evaluating MAS robustness. Our benchmarking results show that evaluating MAS robustness solely through topology is insufficient; robust MAS require deliberate role design and controlled interaction patterns. Moreover, defenses developed in simplified environments often fail to transfer to real-world settings; narrowly scoped defenses may even introduce new vulnerabilities. ACIArena aims to provide a solid foundation for advancing deeper exploration of MAS design principles.

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Thermometer of Thoughts: Enhancing LLM's Exploration via Attention Temperature Modulation

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