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Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has markedly enhanced the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). Its success, however, largely depends on strong base models with rich world knowledge, yielding only modest improvements for small-size language models (SLMs). 
To address this limitation, we investigate Guided GRPO, which injects ground-truth reasoning steps into roll-out trajectories to compensate for SLMs’ inherent weaknesses. Through a comprehensive study of various guidance configurations, we find that naively adding guidance delivers limited gains. These insights motivate G$^2$RPO-A, an adaptive algorithm that automatically adjusts guidance strength in response to the model’s evolving training dynamics. 
Experiments on mathematical reasoning and code-generation benchmarks confirm that G$^2$RPO-A substantially outperforms vanilla GRPO. Our code and models at available at https://github.com/T-Lab-CUHKSZ/G2RPO-A.

ACL 2026

G$^2$RPO-A: Guided Group Relative Policy Optimization with Adaptive Guidance

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>
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technical paper

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) has become a cornerstone of reasoning in large language models, yet its effectiveness is constrained by the limited expressiveness of discrete token sampling. Recent latent reasoning approaches attempt to alleviate this limitation by replacing discrete tokens with soft embeddings (probability-weighted mixtures of token embeddings) or hidden states, but they commonly suffer from two issues: (1) global activation injects perturbations into high-confidence steps, impairing reasoning stability; and (2) soft embeddings quickly collapse toward the highest-probability token, limiting exploration of alternative trajectories. To address these challenges, we propose SeLaR (Selective Latent Reasoning), a lightweight and training-free framework. SeLaR introduces an entropy-gated mechanism that activates soft embeddings only at low-confidence steps, while preserving discrete decoding at high-confidence steps. Additionally, we propose an entropy-aware contrastive regularization that pushes soft embeddings away from the highest-probability token's direction, encouraging sustained exploration of multiple latent reasoning paths. Experiments on five reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that SeLaR consistently outperforms standard CoT and state-of-the-art training-free methods.

SeLaR: Selective Latent Reasoning in Large Language Models

Agentic learning increasingly hinges on interaction, yet real-world experience is expensive, limited, and often irreversible at inference time. World models promise to mitigate these limitations, but it remains unclear whether large language models can actually serve as reliable world models, and deliver concrete benefits to downstream agents. We investigate these questions in text-based environments, a controlled testbed that reframes language modeling as next-state prediction under interaction. We propose a three-level framework to evaluate LLM-based world models: (i) fidelity and consistency, (ii) scalability and robustness, and (iii) agent utility. Across five representative environments, we show that sufficiently trained world models capture coherent environment dynamics, scale predictably with data and model capacity, and unlock tangible agent improvements—for example, action verification boosts GPT-4o by 5.5% on WebShop, and warm-started RL achieves a 15% gain on SciWorld. Crucially, these benefits hinge on behavioral coverage and environment complexity, sharply characterizing when world modeling meaningfully advances agent learning.

From Word to World: Can Large Language Models be Implicit Text-based World Models?

Theory of Mind (ToM), the ability to attribute mental states to others, is a hallmark of social intelligence. While large language models (LLMs) demonstrate promising performance on standard ToM benchmarks, we observe that they often fail to generalize to complex task-specific scenarios, relying heavily on prompt scaffolding to mimic reasoning. The critical misalignment between the internal knowledge and external behavior raises a fundamental question: Do LLMs truly possess intrinsic cognition, and can they externalize this internal knowledge into stable, high-quality behaviors? To answer this, we introduce CoSToM (Causal-oriented Steering for ToM alignment), a framework that transitions from mechanistic interpretation to active intervention. First, we employ causal tracing to map the internal distribution of ToM features, empirically uncovering the internal layers' characteristics in encoding fundamental ToM semantics. Building on this insight, we implement a lightweight alignment framework via targeted activation steering within these ToM-critical layers. Experiments demonstrate that CoSToM significantly enhances human-like social reasoning capabilities and downstream dialogue quality.

CoSToM: Causal-oriented Steering for Intrinsic Theory-of-Mind Alignment in Large Language Models

Over the past year, spatial intelligence has drawn increasing attention. Many prior works study it from the perspective of visual-spatial intelligence, where models have access to visuospatial information from visual inputs. However, in the absence of visual information, whether linguistic intelligence alone is sufficient to endow models with spatial intelligence, and how models perform relevant tasks with text-only inputs still remain unexplored. Therefore, in this paper, we focus on a fundamental and critical capability in spatial intelligence from a linguistic perspective: viewpoint rotation understanding (VRU). Specifically, LLMs and VLMs are asked to infer their final viewpoint and predict the corresponding observation in an environment given textual description of viewpoint rotation and observation over multiple steps. We find that both LLMs and VLMs perform poorly on our proposed dataset while human can easily achieve 100% accuracy, indicating a substantial gap between current model capabilities and the requirements of spatial intelligence. To uncover the underlying mechanisms, we conduct a layer-wise probing analysis and head-wise causal intervention. Our findings reveal that although models encode viewpoint information in the hidden states, they appear to struggle to bind the viewpoint position with corresponding observation, resulting in a hallucination in final layers. Finally, we selectively fine-tune the key attention heads identified by causal intervention to improve VRU performance. Experimental results demonstrate that such selective fine-tuning achieves improved VRU performance while avoiding catastrophic forgetting of generic abilities.

How Do LLMs and VLMs Understand Viewpoint Rotation Without Vision? An Interpretability Study

Recent advances in neural song generation have enabled high-quality synthesis from lyrics and global textual prompts. However, most systems fail to model temporally varying attributes of songs, severely limiting fine-grained control over musical structure and dynamics. To address this, we propose Segtune, a Diffusion Transformer-based framework enabling structured and fine-grained controllability by allowing users or large language models (LLMs) to specify local musical descriptions aligned to song segments. These segment prompts are temporally broadcast to corresponding time windows, while global prompts ensure stylistic coherence. To support precise lyric-to-music alignment, we introduce an LLM-based duration predictor that autoregressively generates sentence-level timestamps in LyRiCs format. We further construct a large-scale data pipeline for high-quality song collection with aligned lyrics and prompts, and propose new metrics to evaluate segment alignment and vocal consistency. Experiments demonstrate that Segtune outperforms existing baselines in both musicality and controllability. Visit our demo page for codes and more generated songs.

SegTune: Structured and Fine-Grained Control for Song Generation

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have made significant progress in chart understanding. However, financial charts, characterized by complex temporal structures and domain-specific terminology, remain notably underexplored. We introduce FinChart-Bench, the first benchmark specifically focused on real-world financial charts. FinChart-Bench comprises 1,200 financial chart images collected from 2015 to 2024, each annotated with True/False (TF), Multiple Choice (MC), and Question Answering (QA) questions, totaling 7,016 questions. We conducted a comprehensive evaluation of 26 state-of-the-art LVLMs on FinChart-Bench. Our evaluation reveals critical insights: (1) the performance gap between open-source and closed-source models is narrowing, (2) performance degradation occurs in upgraded models within families, (3) many models struggle with instruction following, (4) both advanced models show significant limitations in spatial reasoning abilities, and (5) current LVLMs are not reliable enough to serve as automated evaluators. These findings highlight important limitations in current LVLM capabilities for financial chart understanding.

FinChart-Bench: Benchmarking Financial Chart Comprehension in Vision-Language Models

Multi-step symbolic reasoning is essential for robust financial analysis; yet, current benchmarks largely overlook this capability. Existing datasets such as FinQA and ConvFinQA emphasize final numerical answers while neglecting the intermediate reasoning steps required for transparency and verification. To address this gap, we introduce FinChain, the first benchmark specifically designed for verifiable Chain-of-Thought evaluation in finance. FinChain spans 58 topics across 12 financial domains, each represented by parameterized symbolic templates with executable Python code that enable fully machine-verifiable reasoning and scalable, contamination-free data generation.
To assess reasoning capacity, we propose ChainEval, a dynamic alignment measure that jointly evaluates both the final-answer correctness and the step-level reasoning consistency. Our evaluation of 26 leading LLMs reveals that even frontier LLMs exhibit clear limitations in symbolic financial reasoning, while domain-adapted and math-enhanced fine-tuned models can substantially narrow this gap.
Overall, FinChain exposes persistent weaknesses in multi-step financial reasoning and provides a foundation for developing trustworthy, interpretable, and verifiable financial AI. This project is available at https://github.com/mbzuai-nlp/finchain.git.

FinChain: A Symbolic Benchmark for Verifiable Chain-of-Thought Financial Reasoning

Psychological research has long utilized circumplex models to structure emotions, placing similar emotions adjacently and opposing ones diagonally. Although frequently used to interpret deep learning representations, these models are rarely directly incorporated into the representation learning of language models, leaving their geometric validity unexplored. This paper proposes a method to induce circular emotion representations within language model embeddings via contrastive learning on a hypersphere. We show that while this circular alignment offers superior interpretability and robustness against dimensionality reduction, it underperforms compared to conventional designs in high-dimensional settings and fine-grained classification. Our findings elucidate the trade-offs involved in applying psychological circumplex models to deep learning architectures.

Mapping the Circumplex of Affect: Geometric Analysis of Emotion Representations via Hyperspherical Contrastive Learning

Recent progress in large language models (LLMs) has led to impressive performance on a range of tasks, yet advanced instruction following (IF)—especially for complex, multi-turn, and system-prompted instructions—remains a significant challenge. Rigorous evaluation and effective training for such capabilities are hindered by the lack of high-quality, human-annotated benchmarks and reliable, interpretable reward signals. In this work, we introduce AdvancedIF, a comprehensive benchmark featuring over 1,600 prompts and expert-curated rubrics that assess LLMs’ ability to follow complex, multi-turn, and system-level instructions. We also open-source the evaluation script of AdvancedIF. We further propose RIFL (Rubric-based Instruction-Following Learning), a novel post-training pipeline that leverages rubric generation, a finetuned rubric verifier, and reward shaping to enable effective reinforcement learning for instruction following. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RIFL substantially improves the instruction-following abilities of LLMs, achieving a 6.7% absolute gain on AdvancedIF and strong results on public benchmarks. Our ablation studies confirm the effectiveness of each component in RIFL. This work establishes rubrics as a powerful tool for both training and evaluating advanced IF in LLMs, paving the way for more capable and reliable AI systems.

AdvancedIF: Rubric-Based Benchmarking and Reinforcement Learning for Advancing LLM Instruction Following

Coreference Resolution (CR) is a critical task in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Current research faces a key dilemma: whether to further explore the potential of supervised neural methods based on small language models, whose detect-then-cluster pipeline still delivers top performance, or embrace the powerful capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, effectively combining their strengths remains underexplored. To this end, we propose \textbf{ImCoref-CeS}, a novel framework that integrates an enhanced supervised model with LLM-based reasoning. First, we present an improved CR method (\textbf{ImCoref}) to push the performance boundaries of the supervised neural method by introducing a lightweight bridging module to enhance long-text encoding capability, devising a biaffine scorer to comprehensively capture positional information, and invoking a hybrid mention regularization to improve training efficiency. Importantly, we employ an LLM acting as a multi-role Checker-Splitter agent to validate candidate mentions (filtering out invalid ones) and coreference results (splitting erroneous clusters) predicted by ImCoref. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of ImCoref-CeS, which achieves superior performance compared to existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods.

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SeLaR: Selective Latent Reasoning in Large Language Models

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