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Large Language Models (LLMs) have been widely explored in educational scenarios. We identify a critical vulnerability in current educational LLMs, pedagogical jailbreaks, where students use answer-inducing prompts to elicit solutions rather than scaffolded instructions. To enable systematic study, we unify and formalize safe, helpful, and pedagogical behaviors with a knowledge-mastery graph and introduce SHAPE, a benchmark of 9,087 student-question pairs for evaluating tutoring behavior under adversarial pressure. We propose a graph-augmented tutoring pipeline that infers prerequisite concepts from queries, identifies mastery gaps, and routes generation between instructing and problem-solving via explicit gating. Experiments across multiple LLMs show that our method yields significantly improved safety under two pedagogical jailbreak settings, while maintaining near-ceiling helpfulness under the same evaluation protocol. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/MAPS-research/SHaPE

ACL 2026

SHAPE: Unifying Safety, Helpfulness and Pedagogy for Educational LLMs

technical paper

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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The 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026) will take place in San Diego, California, from July 2 - 7, 2026.

Instruction Tuning has emerged as a pivotal post-training paradigm that enables pre-trained language models to better follow user instructions. Despite its significance, little attention has been given to optimizing the loss function used. A fundamental, yet often overlooked, question is whether the conventional auto-regressive objective – where loss is computed only on response tokens, excluding prompt tokens – is truly optimal for instruction tuning. In this work, we systematically investigate the impact of differentially weighting prompt and response tokens in instruction tuning loss, and propose Weighted Instruction Tuning (WIT) as a better alternative to conventional instruction tuning. Through extensive experiments on five language models of different families and scale, three finetuning datasets of different sizes, and five diverse evaluation benchmarks, we show that the standard instruction tuning loss often yields suboptimal performance and limited robustness to input prompt variations. We find that a low-to-moderate weight for prompt tokens coupled with a moderate-to-high weight for response tokens yields the best-performing models across settings and also serve as better starting points for the subsequent preference alignment training. These findings highlight the need to reconsider instruction-tuning loss and offer actionable insights for developing more robust and generalizable models. Our code is open-sourced at https://github.com/kowndinya-renduchintala/WIT.

On the Effect of Instruction Tuning Loss on Generalization

Existing LLM-based role-playing methods often rely on superficial textual descriptions or simplistic metrics, inadequately modeling both intrinsic and extrinsic character dimensions. Additionally, they typically simulate character memory with implicit model knowledge or basic retrieval augment generation without explicit memory alignment, compromising memory consistency. The two issues weaken reliability of role-playing LLMs in several applications, such as trustworthy social simulation. To address these limitations, we propose PsyMem, a novel framework integrating fine-grained psychological attributes and explicit memory control for role-playing. PsyMem supplements textual descriptions with 26 psychological indicators to detailed model character. Additionally, PsyMem implements memory alignment training, explicitly trains the model to align character's response with  memory, thereby enabling dynamic memory-controlled responding during inference. By training Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct on our  specially designed dataset (including 5,414 characters and 38,962 dialogues extracted from novels), the resulting model, termed as PsyMem-Qwen, outperforms baseline models in role-playing, achieving the best performance in human-likeness and character  fidelity. 

PsyMem: Fine-grained psychological alignment and Explicit Memory Control for Advanced Role-Playing LLMs

Large language models (LLMs) have recently been applied to 3D vision-language (3D-VL) tasks, which require spatial reasoning to identify target objects relative to anchors. Scene graphs are commonly employed to represent such relations, but reasoning over complete graphs incurs high token costs and computational inefficiencies, motivating the need for pruning. Existing pruning methods primarily rely on spatial proximity and often remove task-relevant relations, thereby undermining reliable spatial reasoning. To address these limitations, we derive a key requirement for scene graph pruning: preserving spatial relations that are most pertinent to the specific 3D-VL task. Guided by this insight, we propose the Conceptual-Adjacent Scene Graph Pruner (CAPruner). CAPruner integrates fuzzy semantic relevance with spatial proximity to estimate the importance of relations, enabling the selection of critical relations in a task-specific context. Moreover, to avoid costly relation-level annotations, CAPruner is trained by supervising the aggregated scores of each node's incident edges. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CAPruner effectively preserves relations essential for spatial reasoning, leading to substantial performance improvements of LLMs on 3D-VL tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/fz-zsl/CAPruner.

CAPruner: Conceptual-Adjacent Scene Graph Pruner for Enhancing 3D Spatial Reasoning of Large Language Models

Many recent studies have shown that the perception of speech can be decoded from brain signals and subsequently reconstructed as continuous language. However, there is a lack of neurological basis for how the semantic information embedded within brain signals can be used more effectively to guide language reconstruction. Predictive coding theory suggests the human brain naturally engages in continuously predicting future words that span multiple timescales. This implies that the decoding of brain signals could potentially be associated with a predictable future. To explore the predictive coding theory within the context of language reconstruction, this paper proposes PredFT (FMRI-to-Text decoding with Predictive coding). PredFT consists of a main network and a side network. The side network obtains brain predictive representation from related regions of interest (ROIs) with a self-attention module. The representation is then fused into the main network for continuous language decoding. Experiments on two naturalistic language comprehension fMRI datasets show that PredFT outperforms current decoding models on several evaluation metrics.

Language Reconstruction with Brain Predictive Coding from fMRI Data

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has demonstrated significant potential in enhancing large language models (LLMs) by supplementing external knowledge. However, existing approaches focus primarily on retrieving isolated factual knowledge entities while neglecting the critical reasoning relationships. To address this limitation, Graph-Augmented Generation (GraphRAG) has emerged as an effective solution, which explicitly integrates structured knowledge graphs to support complex reasoning tasks. Although diverse graph construction methods have been explored, they typically rely on static, query-agnostic graphs constructed via fixed heuristics. We are thereby motivated to propose a query-centric retrieval framework that adaptively constructs a graph tailored to each query. However, it is challenging to accurately identify these latent relationships from queries to the corpus. Moreover, unifying multiple local-perspective connections into a globally coherent structured corpus introduces additional complexity. To this end, we introduce HyperRAG, a novel framework in the Hyperbolic space that captures both explicit entity-based links and implicit query-aware connections. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that HyperRAG consistently outperforms existing baselines.

Query-Aware Knowledge Retrieval via Hyperbolic Structuring

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) excel in general tasks but struggle with specialized, structured cultural symbols. We introduce BoYaEval, the first comprehensive benchmark dedicated to deciphering diverse Ancient Chinese musical notations, including five types of ancient Chinese music notation systems. These systems utilize unique spatial layouts and specialized ideograms to encode pitch and intricate playing techniques. BoYaEval comprises 3,175 high-quality images across these notation styles and establishes a three-tier evaluation: Structural Parsing (symbol recognition), Instructional Translation (technique mapping), and Musical Reasoning (melody derivation). We evaluate 21 leading MLLMs. Results indicate that while models perform adequately in basic recognition, they fail in cross-system compositional logic, scoring only around 27\% on reasoning tasks. BoYaEval highlights the limitations of current MLLMs in processing diverse spatial-symbolic dependencies, bridging the gap between ancient wisdom and modern AI for digitizing intangible cultural heritage. The BoYaEval benchmark is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/MYTH-Lab/BoYaEval.

BoYaEval: Evaluating Multimodal Large Language Models on Understanding Ancient Chinese Musical Scores

Automated interlinear gloss prediction with neural networks is a promising approach to accelerate language documentation efforts. However, while state-of-the-art models like GlossLM (Ginn et al., 2024) achieve high scores on glossing benchmarks, user studies with linguists have found critical barriers to the usefulness of such models in real-world scenarios (Rice et al., 2025). In particular, existing models typically generate morpheme-level glosses but assign them to whole words without predicting the actual morpheme boundaries, making the predictions less interpretable and thus untrustworthy to human annotators.

We conduct the first study on neural models that \textbf{jointly predict interlinear glosses and the corresponding morphological segmentation} from raw text. We run experiments to determine the optimal way to train models that balance segmentation and glossing accuracy, as well as the alignment between the two tasks. We extend the training corpus of GlossLM and pretrain PolyGloss, a family of seq2seq multilingual models for joint segmentation and glossing that outperforms GlossLM on glossing and beats various open-source LLMs on segmentation, glossing, and alignment. In addition, we demonstrate that PolyGloss can be quickly adapted to a new dataset via low-rank adaptation.

Massively Multilingual Joint Segmentation and Glossing

While Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrates remarkable zero-shot annotation tasks, they often struggle with the specialized conventions of gold-standard benchmarks. We propose the systematic reuse and refinement of annotation guidelines as an alignment mechanism, introducing an iterative moderation framework that simulates the early phases of annotation projects. We evaluate three hypotheses: (1) the efficacy of guideline integration, (2) the advantage of reasoning-optimized models, and (3) the viability of moderation under minimal supervision. Testing across biomedical NER tasks (NCBI Disease, BC5CDR, BioRED) with three LLM families (GPT, Gemini, DeepSeek), our results empirically confirm all three hypotheses. While the iterative moderation framework shows a good potential in effectively refining guidelines, our analysis also reveals a significant room for improvement.

Refining and Reusing Annotation Guidelines for LLM Annotation

Dialogue models falter in noisy, multi-speaker environments, often producing irrelevant responses and awkward turn-taking. We present AV-Dialog, the first multimodal dialog framework that uses both audio and visual cues to track the target speaker, predict turn-taking, and generate coherent responses. By combining acoustic tokenization with multi-task, multi-stage training on monadic, synthetic, and real audio-visual dialogue datasets, AV-Dialog achieves robust streaming transcription, semantically grounded turn-boundary detection and accurate responses, resulting in a natural conversational flow. Experiments show that AV-Dialog outperforms audio-only models under interference, reducing transcription errors, improving turn-taking prediction, and enhancing human-rated dialogue quality. These results highlight the power of seeing as well as hearing for speaker-aware interaction, paving the way for spoken dialogue agents that perform robustly in real-world, noisy environments.

AV-Dialog: Spoken Dialogue Models with Audio-Visual Input

Effective biomedical information retrieval requires modeling domain semantics and hierarchical relationships among biomedical texts. Existing biomedical generative retrievers built on coarse binary relevance signals, limiting their ability to capture semantic overlap. We propose BioHiCL - Biomedical Retrieval with Hierarchical Multi-Label Contrastive Learning, which leverages hierarchical MeSH annotations to provide structured supervision for multi-label contrastive learning. Our models, BioHiCL-Base (0.1B) and BioHiCL-Large (0.3B), achieve promising performance on biomedical retrieval, sentence similarity, and question answering tasks, while remaining computationally efficient for deployment.

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On the Effect of Instruction Tuning Loss on Generalization

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