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When large language models are used in real-world scenarios, continual learning (CL) becomes a non-trivial problem. In particular, continual learning with modern LLMs is challenged both by the substantial computational costs induced by their massive parameter scale, and by the limitations of current CL methods, which are mainly designed to mitigate catastrophic forgetting while neglecting knowledge sharing across tasks. We further observe that models with stronger performance exhibit stronger inter-task connections. In light of the above challenges and findings, we propose Attribution Scores-based Soft Orthogonality Low-Rank Adaptation (ASO-LoRA), an effective and efficient framework that simultaneously facilitates knowledge transfer while mitigating catastrophic forgetting. Specifically, ASO-LoRA initially assigns task-specific parameter subspaces for new tasks utilizing multi-LoRA modules, enabling for efficient training and inference without relying on task labels. Then, ASO-LoRA leverages attribution scores to evaluate task similarity and employs soft orthogonality between task-specific subspaces, guiding gradient updates in directions that promote parameter isolation, achieving a balance between knowledge transfer and preservation. Experiments are carried out on both the T5-large and the LLaMA2-7B, showing ASO-LoRA’s superior performance and suitability as a plug-in CL solution for general Transformer-based LLMs. Code is available at https://github.com/736619821/ASO-LORA.

ACL 2026

Soft Orthogonal Low-Rank Adaptation for Knowledge Sharing in Large Language Model Continual Learning

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.

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. 
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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.

Dense retrieval represents queries and documents as high-dimensional embeddings, but these representations can be redundant at the query level: for a given information need, only a subset of dimensions is consistently helpful for ranking. Prior work addresses this via pseudo-relevance feedback (PRF) based dimension importance estimation, which can produce query-aware masks without labeled data but often relies on noisy pseudo signals and heuristic test-time procedures. In contrast, supervised adapter methods leverage relevance labels to improve embedding quality, yet they learn global transformations shared across queries and do not explicitly model query-aware dimension importance. We propose a Query-Aware Adaptive Dimension Selection framework that \emph{learns} to predict per-dimension importance directly from query embedding. We first construct oracle dimension importance distributions over embedding dimensions using supervised relevance labels, and then train a predictor to map a query embedding to these label-distilled importance scores. At inference, the predictor selects a query-aware subset of dimensions for similarity computation based solely on the query embedding, without pseudo-relevance feedback. Experiments across multiple dense retrievers and benchmarks show that our learned dimension selector improves retrieval effectiveness over the full-dimensional baseline as well as PRF-based masking and supervised adapter baselines.

Learning to Select: Query-Aware Adaptive Dimension Selection for Dense Retrieval

Although the effectiveness of Large Language Models as judges has been validated, their performance remains limited in open-ended tasks, particularly in story evaluation. Accurate story evaluation is crucial not only for assisting human quality judgment but also for providing reward signals to guide story generation. However, existing methods face a dilemma: prompt engineering for closed-source models suffers from poor adaptability, while fine-tuning approaches for open-source models lack the reasoning capabilities essential for story evaluation. To address this, we propose the Self-Evolving Pairwise Reasoning (EvolvR) framework. Grounded in pairwise comparison, the framework first self-synthesizes score-aligned Chain-of-Thought (CoT) data via a multi-persona strategy. To ensure data quality, these raw CoTs undergo a self-filtering process, utilizing multi-agents to guarantee their logical rigor and robustness. Finally, the evaluator trained on the refined data is deployed as a reward model to guide the story generation task. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on three evaluation benchmarks including StoryER, HANNA and OpenMEVA. Furthermore, when served as a reward model, it enhances the quality of generated stories, thereby validating the superiority of our self-evolving approach.

EvolvR: Self-Evolving Pairwise Reasoning for Story Evaluation to Enhance Generation

Large language models (LLMs) have driven major progress in NLP, yet their substantial memory and compute demands still hinder practical deployment. Binarization can compress weights to 1 bit, fundamentally lowering compute and bandwidth cost. However, existing methods cannot address activation heavy tails and thus must keep activations in high precision, preventing true end-to-end acceleration. To overcome this limitation, we propose BWLA, the first post-training quantization framework that preserves high accuracy while achieving 1-bit weight quantization together with low-bit activations (e.g., 6 bits). The Orthogonal-Kronecker Transformation (OKT) learns an orthogonal mapping via EM minimization, converting unimodal weights into symmetric bimodal forms while suppressing activation tails and incoherence. The Proximal SVD Projection (PSP) then performs lightweight low-rank refinement through proximal SVD projection, further enhancing quantizability with minimal overhead. On Qwen3-32B, BWLA reaches a Wikitext2 perplexity of 11.92 under 6-bit activations (vs. 38 from SOTA), improves five zero-shot tasks by more than 70%, and delivers 3.26× inference speedup, demonstrating strong potential for real-world LLM compression and acceleration. The code will be available at [BWLA](https://github.com/Kishon-zzx/BWLA).

BWLA: Breaking the Barrier of W1AX Post-Training Quantization for LLMs

Reinforcement learning for open-ended text generation is constrained by the lack of verifiable rewards, necessitating reliance on judge models that require either annotated data or powerful closed-source models. Inspired by recent work on unsupervised reinforcement learning for mathematical reasoning using confidence-based endogenous rewards, we investigate whether this principle can be adapted to open-ended writing tasks. We find that directly applying confidence rewards leads to Triviality Bias: the policy collapses toward high-probability outputs, reducing diversity and meaningful content. We propose TCER (Triviality Corrected Endogenous Reward), which addresses this bias by rewarding the relative information gain between a specialist policy and a generalist reference policy, modulated by a probability-dependent correction mechanism. Across multiple writing benchmarks and model architectures, TCER achieves consistent improvements without external supervision. Furthermore, TCER also transfers effectively to mathematical reasoning, validating the generality of our approach across different generation tasks.

Triviality Corrected Endogenous Reward

While Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning significantly enhances the performance of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), its autoregressive nature incurs prohibitive latency constraints. Current efforts to mitigate this via token compression often fail by blindly applying text-centric metrics to multimodal contexts. We identify a critical failure mode termed Visual Amnesia, where linguistically redundant tokens are erroneously pruned, leading to hallucinations. To address this, we introduce V-Skip that reformulates token pruning as a Visual-Anchored Information Bottleneck (VA-IB) optimization problem. V-Skip employs a dual-path gating mechanism that weighs token importance through both linguistic surprisal and cross-modal attention flow, effectively rescuing visually salient anchors. Extensive experiments on Qwen2-VL and Llama-3.2 families demonstrate that V-Skip achieves a 
speedup with negligible accuracy loss. Specifically, it preserves fine-grained visual details, outperforming other baselines over 30% on the DocVQA.

Chain-of-Thought Compression Should Not Be Blind: V-Skip for Efficient Multimodal Reasoning via Dual-Path Anchoring

Machine unlearning for large language models (LLMs) aims to remove targeted knowledge while preserving general capability. In this paper, we recast LLM unlearning as an asymmetric two-task problem: retention is the primary objective and forgetting is an auxiliary. From this perspective, we propose a retention-prioritized gradient synthesis framework that decouples task-specific gradient extraction from conflict-aware combination. Instantiating the framework, we adapt established PCGrad to resolve gradient conflicts, and introduce SAGO, a novel retention-prioritized gradient synthesis method. Theoretically, both variants ensure non-negative cosine similarity with the retain gradient, while SAGO achieves strictly tighter alignment through constructive sign-constrained synthesis. Empirically, on WMDP Bio/Cyber and RWKU benchmarks, SAGO consistently pushes the Pareto frontier: e.g., on WMDP Bio (SimNPO+GD), recovery of target model MMLU performance progresses from 44.6% (naive) to 94.0% (+PCGrad) and further to 96.0% (+SAGO), while maintaining comparable forgetting strength. Our results show that re-shaping gradient geometry, rather than re-balancing losses, is the key to mitigating unlearning-retention trade-offs.

Modeling LLM Unlearning as an Asymmetric Two-Task Learning Problem

Olfaction lies at the intersection of chemical structure, neural encoding, and linguistic perception, yet existing representation methods fail to fully capture this pathway. Current approaches typically model only isolated segments of the olfactory pathway, overlooking the complete chain from molecule to receptors to linguistic descriptions. Such fragmentation yields learned embeddings that lack both biological grounding and semantic interpretability. We propose NOSE (Neural Olfactory-Semantic Embedding), a representation learning framework that aligns three modalities along the olfactory pathway: molecular structure, receptor sequence, and natural language description. Rather than simply fusing these signals, we decouple their contributions via orthogonal constraints, preserving the unique encoded information of each modality. To address the sparsity of olfactory language, we introduce a weak positive sample strategy to calibrate semantic similarity, preventing erroneous repulsion of similar odors in the feature space. Extensive experiments demonstrate that NOSE achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance and excellent zero-shot generalization, confirming the strong alignment between its representation space and human olfactory intuition. Code and data are available at https://github.com/Xianyusyy/NOSE

NOSE: Neural Olfactory-Semantic Embedding with Tri-Modal Orthogonal Contrastive Learning

LLM serving is limited by provider-side resources: longer generations consume more GPU time, increase latency, and reduce throughput in multi-tenant systems. This creates a denial-of-service (DoS) risk, where attackers degrade service by inducing excessive generation. 
Prior work on LLM DoS primarily relies on adversarial perturbations that delay end-of-sequence termination. We show perturbations are often unnecessary: natural, benign-looking instructions that specify impractical and meaningless tasks can already trigger excessive generation. To study this overlooked vulnerability, we introduce \NaturalSloth, an adversarial dataset of natural, instruction-based DoS prompts. Starting from a human-curated seed set spanning diverse attack categories, we design a multi-agent synthesis framework to scale the dataset while preserving malicious intent and increasing semantic diversity. Experiments across a wide range of proprietary and open-source LLMs show that NaturalSloth consistently induces excessive generation, with attack effectiveness further amplified when combined with jailbreak techniques. Our analysis also reveals significant limitations of existing defenses, highlighting the need for dedicated protections against natural DoS attacks.

NaturalSloth: Revisiting Denial-of-Service Attacks on Large Language Models

Automated medical report generation for 3D PET/CT imaging is fundamentally challenged by the high-dimensional nature of volumetric data and a critical scarcity of annotated datasets, particularly for low-resource languages. Current black-box methods map whole volumes to reports, ignoring the clinical workflow of analyzing localized Regions of Interest (RoIs) to derive diagnostic conclusions. In this paper, we bridge this gap by introducing VietPET-RoI, the first large-scale 3D PET/CT dataset with fine-grained RoI annotation for a low-resource language, comprising 600 PET/CT samples and 1,960 manually annotated RoIs, paired with corresponding clinical reports. Furthermore, to demonstrate the utility of this dataset, we propose HiRRA, a novel framework that mimics the professional radiologist diagnostic workflow by employing graph-based relational modules to capture dependencies between RoI attributes. This approach shifts from global pattern matching toward localized clinical findings. Additionally, we introduce new clinical evaluation metrics, namely RoI Coverage and RoI Quality Index, that measure both RoI localization accuracy and attribute description fidelity using LLM-based extraction. Extensive evaluation demonstrates that our framework achieves SOTA performance, surpassing existing models by 19.7% in BLEU and 4.7% in ROUGE-L, while achieving a remarkable 45.8% improvement in clinical metrics, indicating enhanced clinical reliability and reduced hallucination. Our code and dataset are available on GitHub.

Region-Grounded Report Generation for 3D Medical Imaging: A Fine-Grained Dataset and Graph-Enhanced Framework

Vision-language reward modeling faces a dilemma: generative approaches are interpretable but slow, while discriminative ones are efficient but act as opaque "black boxes." To bridge this gap, we propose VL-MDR (Vision-Language Multi-Dimensional Reward), a framework that dynamically decomposes evaluation into granular, interpretable dimensions. Instead of outputting a monolithic scalar, VL-MDR employs a visual-aware gating mechanism to identify relevant dimensions and adaptively weight them (e.g., Hallucination, Reasoning) for each specific input. To support this, we curate a dataset of 321k vision-language preference pairs annotated across 21 fine-grained dimensions. Extensive experiments show that VL-MDR consistently outperforms existing open-source reward models on benchmarks like VL-RewardBench. Furthermore, we show that VL-MDR-constructed preference pairs effectively enable DPO alignment to mitigate visual hallucinations and improve reliability, providing a scalable solution for VLM alignment.

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Learning to Select: Query-Aware Adaptive Dimension Selection for Dense Retrieval

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