United States

Visual Language Models (VLMs) have become a robust foundation for document question answering. Processing long documents remains challenging due to limited context windows and computational budgets. Existing page-level retrieval methods offer a practical solution, typically encoding pages and queries into vectors and ranking them via cosine similarity. However, such embedding‑based methods (i) lack query–page interaction before similarity scoring and (ii) usually require large-scale datasets to align visual and textual embeddings. In this paper, we observe that the cross‑modal attention maps of well‑trained VLMs are able to highlight semantically relevant regions. Building on this insight, we present CAPS (Cross-modal Attention as Page Selector), a retrieval framework that utilizes attention mechanisms inside VLMs for page selection. Specifically, CAPS first enhances attention-based retrieval capability with a small amount of contrastive data, then identifies the most effective attention head through expert head selection, and finally employs an adaptive filtering mechanism to obtain an appropriate number of relevant page candidates. Extensive experiments on four long-document benchmarks demonstrate that CAPS outperforms state-of-the-art embedding‑based methods in both retrieval precision and downstream DocQA accuracy. Notably, CAPS achieves these gains using less than 10% of the training data required by competing baselines, highlighting the data efficiency of attention-based page retrieval.

ACL 2026

Attention as Selector: Unlocking VLM Attention for Long Document Page Retrieval

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

The hallmark of Deep Research agents lies in compositional reasoning, the capacity to aggregate distributed, heterogeneous information into coherent logical insights. 
However, current agentic systems are often retrieval-heavy but reasoning-light, where success is predominantly determined by simple entity-seeking rather than the multi-step aggregation of scattered evidence. 
To address this, we propose a data synthesis pipeline WebAggregator, designed to shift the agentic paradigm from retrieval-centric to compositional aggregation. Our approach first employs Proactive Explorer to collect interconnected knowledge, then Compositional Logic Proposer to weave knowledge into complex questions using over 12 composition guidelines derived from a rigorous deconstruction of the Deep Research problem setting. Fine-tuning on this corpus fundamentally transforms agent behavior, fostering deliberate composition reasoning and reduced tool redundancy. The resulting WebAggregator-32B surpasses GPT-4.1 and matches Claude-3.7-Sonnet on GAIA, WebWalkerQA, and XBench. To address the lack of benchmarks that emphasize both reasoning and retrieval, we introduce the WebAggregatorQA testbed, which reveals that even with perfect retrieval, top-tier models still underperformed. These results demonstrate that compositional reasoning, not retrieval, is the true performance ceiling for next-generation research agents.

WebAggregator: Enhancing Compositional Reasoning Capabilities of Deep Research Agent Foundation Models

Large language models (LLMs) can effectively handle outdated information through knowledge editing. However, current approaches face two key limitations: **(I) Poor generalization:** Most approaches rigidly inject new knowledge without ensuring that the model can use it effectively to solve practical problems. **(II) Narrow scope:** Current methods focus primarily on structured fact triples, overlooking the diverse unstructured forms of factual information (e.g., news, articles) prevalent in real-world contexts. To address these challenges, we propose a new paradigm: teaching LLMs to edit knowledge via **Chain of Thoughts** (CoTs) reasoning (CoT2Edit). We first leverage language model agents for both structured and unstructured edited data to generate CoTs, building high-quality instruction data. The model is then trained to reason over edited knowledge through supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). At inference time, we integrate Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to dynamically retrieve relevant edited facts for real-time knowledge editing. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves strong generalization across six diverse knowledge editing scenarios with **just a single round of training** on three open-source language models.

Learning to Edit Knowledge via Instruction-based Chain-of-Thought Prompting

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in dialogue systems and interactive agents, their social adaptation during natural interaction has drawn growing attention. While prior work shows strong social regulation under explicit role or style instructions, it remains unclear whether LLMs can spontaneously perceive and respond to implicit social differences without explicit prompts. Focusing on high-context Chinese interactions, we identify a robust phenomenon termed Social Agnosia, where LLMs fail to adequately perceive and accommodate implicit social power, affective arousal, and epistemic status during natural interaction. To diagnose this behavior, we propose C-ISA, a framework grounded in Communication Accommodation Theory that decomposes social adaptation into three approximately orthogonal dimensions, and conduct controlled comparisons across multiple Chinese LLMs under implicit and explicit conditions. Results show that while models substantially adjust linguistic strategies under explicit conditioning, they exhibit socially insensitive and homogenized responses in natural interaction, revealing a structural gap between spontaneous behavior and conditioned capability. The C-ISA dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/ty373/C-ISA.

Know Your Place: Diagnosing Implicit Social Adaptation Failures in Chinese Large Language Models

Large language models have significantly advanced Multilingual Machine Translation (MMT), yet scaling to many languages while keeping quality robust across directions remains challenging.
In this paper, we identify a failure mode of multilingual supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on multi-way parallel data: when such data are reused symmetrically around a pivot language (e.g., English), performance on reverse directions (X $\to$ pivot) can drop substantially.
We term this phenomenon Directional Degeneration and attribute it to excessive many-to-one mappings, which encourage shortcut learning.
We propose Strategic Downsampling (SD), a simple yet effective method to mitigate this degeneration.
In addition, we introduce Parallel Multilingual Prompting (PMP), which augments translation instructions with an auxiliary parallel sentence to promote cross-lingual transfer during training and enables optional test-time enhancement when auxiliary translations are available. 
We further develop \textbf{NiuTrans.LMT} (\textbf{L}arge-scale \textbf{M}ultilingual \textbf{T}ranslation, abbreviated as \textbf{LMT}), a Chinese–English-centric suite of multilingual translation models spanning four sizes (0.6B/1.7B/4B/8B) and covering 60 languages and 234 directions.
Comprehensive evaluations show that LMT is competitive among open-source MMT systems, and that our 4B LMT model performs on par with or better than substantially larger baselines. 
We release our models and project resources to support inclusive and scalable MMT.

NiuTrans.LMT: Toward Inclusive and Scalable Multilingual Machine Translation with LLMs

Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (MRAG) enhances reasoning capabilities by integrating external knowledge. However, existing benchmarks primarily focus on simple image-text interactions, overlooking complex visual formats like charts that are prevalent in real-world applications. In this work, we introduce a novel task, $\textbf{Chart-based MRAG}$, to address this limitation. 
To generate high-quality evaluation samples, we propose $\textbf{CHARGE}$ ($\textbf{CHAR}$t-based document question-answering $\textbf{GE}$neration), a semi-automatic framework for generating evaluation samples through multi-modal keypoint extraction, knowledge graph construction, and qa pair synthesis.
By combining CHARGE with expert validation, we construct $\textbf{Chart-MRAG Bench}$, a comprehensive benchmark for chart-based MRAG evaluation, featuring 4,738 question-answering pairs across 8 domains from real-world documents.
Our experiments reveal three critical limitations in current approaches: (1) unified multimodal embedding retrieval methods struggles in chart-based scenarios, (2) even with ground-truth retrieval, state-of-the-art Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) achieve only 71.15\% Correctness and 80.74\% Coverage scores, and (3) Widely-used MLLMs demonstrate consistent text-over-visual modality bias. 
These findings highlight great challenges in processing information-dense visual formats. We will make our code and dataset publicly available.

Chart-MRAG: Benchmarking Multimodal Retrieval Augmented Generation on Chart-based Documents

Repository-level code completion relies on retrieval strategies to select relevant context from large codebases. Most existing methods employ single-dimensional retrieval based on textual similarity or dependency existence, leading to inconsistent performance across completion scenarios. Even task-adaptive and hybrid methods incur high computational costs while failing to explicitly consider structural hierarchy for retrieving functionally similar code. We introduce **AIRCoder**, a multi-dimensional retrieval framework that combines eight complementary metrics across three dimensions: textual similarity, dependency existence, and structural hierarchy. By proposing a structure-preserving chunking strategy and lightweight fusion module, AIRCoder learns context-dependent weights to adaptively integrate retrieval metrics for each query. Experiments on CrossCodeEval and RepoEval demonstrate that AIRCoder achieves an average improvement of **4.63\%** in exact match over the best baseline, with **10.2$\times$** higher efficiency and strong cross-language generalization across Python, Java, C\#, and TypeScript.

AIRCoder: Adaptive Integration of Multi-dimensional Retrieval for Repository-level Code Completion

Scaling LLM-based agents to long-horizon deep research is constrained by the context-noise trade-off, where linear history accumulation degrades reasoning and dilutes fine-grained evidence. To address this, we introduce the Cognitive Scaffold, a factorized memory architecture that decouples the cognitive state into a Fluid Working Context for immediate reasoning and a persistent Knowledge Graph for long-term retention. Unlike unstructured summarization, our framework employs a Rejection Sampling Fine-Tuning (RFT) pipeline to crystallize saturated context into structured event snapshots, strictly enforcing atomic constraints to preserve numerical values and entities. During reasoning, a thought-driven dual-path retrieval mechanism enables the agent to proactively recover precise evidence. Empirical evaluations on Xbench-DeepSearch, BrowseComp-ZH, and GAIA demonstrate that Cognitive Scaffold consistently outperforms baselines, achieving 74.7% Avg@3 and 87.0% Pass@3 on Xbench-DeepSearch, 48.5% Avg@3 and 65.9% Pass@3 on BrowseComp-ZH, and 72.8% Avg@3 and 88.3% Pass@3 on GAIA, while reducing compression hallucinations to 5.3%. We open-source our codebase to facilitate future research.

Cognitive Scaffold: From Fluid Context to Crystallized Memory for Long-Horizon DeepResearch Agents

$N$-ary knowledge graph completion (KGC) aims to infer missing components in facts with multiple entities under distinct semantic roles, commonly formulated as a knowledge hypergraph link prediction task. Most embedding-based approaches score individual hyperedges relying on enriched structural representations, but overlook intermediate propagation states containing complementary local and global structural evidence. Despite their capability to generate chain-of-thought (CoT) representations for the classical KGC task, large language models (LLMs) struggle with hypergraph structure involving multiple facts, while current hypergraph QA methods only provide LLMs with a single query signal rather than path-level evidence. These limitations hinder the transferability of existing methods, especially those leveraging LLMs, to solve the knowledge hypergraph link prediction problem. To bridge this gap, we propose HyperCoT, a structure-aware approach that models multi-hop structural reasoning as a depth-sensitive progressive evidence accumulation process. It constructs a Graphical Chain-of-Thought (Graph-CoT) by aggregating role-aware hyperedge states along strongly correlated reasoning paths, and injects the resulting path-level structural evidence into each token in query and candidate entities to prompt LLMs. Experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that HyperCoT consistently outperforms strong $n$-ary KGC baselines, particularly in high arity and structural sparsity scenarios, meanwhile yielding interpretable multi-hop reasoning traces.

Learning to Think on Hypergraph: HyperCoT for Structure-Guided N-ary Knowledge Graph Completion

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is a mainstream approach to mitigating hallucinations in Large Language Models (LLMs), yet in dynamic real-world scenarios, such as weather forecasting or evolving news events, existing retrievers suffer from both temporal-semantic misalignment and outdated-document interference. To address this, we propose Relevance & Recency Retrieval (Re$^3$), a novel framework that mitigates temporal hallucinations via two core components: a Time-Aware Dual Relevance Encoder that embeds heterogeneous temporal signals into the semantic space to ensure retrieval fidelity, and a Conflict-Aware Recency Filter that performs listwise arbitration to identify and suppress obsolete factual versions. To rigorously evaluate this setting, we introduce Re$^2$ Bench, a large-scale benchmark comprising over 1.3 million instances designed to assess system robustness in realistic environments where temporal constraints and conflicting factual versions coexist. Experiments on three public benchmarks and Re$^2$ Bench demonstrate that Re$^3$ consistently outperforms the strongest baselines by an average of 9.7% in generation accuracy, with gains of up to 25.2% on challenging dynamic tasks, while demonstrating robustness across diverse RAG settings.

Re$^3$: Relevance & Recency Retrieval for Mitigating Temporal Hallucination

Human cognition excels at extending knowledge through analogy, where word meanings evolve along structured pathways from concrete prototypes to abstract senses via metaphor and metonymy. Do Large Language Models (LLMs) internalize this generative logic, or merely mimic statistical patterns? To investigate this, we introduce CogEvolve, a cognitive linguistic benchmark designed to test these evolutionary pathways across textual and visual modalities. Our evaluation reveals a distinct cognitive profile: models function as "Super-Associators" expert at static recognition yet fail at causal reasoning. In text, they exhibit a Frequency-Primacy Conflation, confusing statistical prevalence with cognitive basicness. Crucially, this reasoning collapses further in the visual domain. We term this deficit the Ungrounded Arrow: models possess high-fidelity concept representations (the "dots") but lack the transformational operators (the "arrows") essential for true relational understanding.

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WebAggregator: Enhancing Compositional Reasoning Capabilities of Deep Research Agent Foundation Models

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