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Recent Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) like DeepSeek-R1 have demonstrated remarkable success in complex reasoning tasks, exhibiting human-like patterns in exploring multiple alternative solutions. Upon closer inspection, however, we uncover a surprising phenomenon: The First is The Best, where alternative solutions are not merely suboptimal but potentially detrimental. This observation challenges widely accepted test-time scaling laws, leading us to hypothesize that errors within the reasoning path scale concurrently with test time. Through comprehensive empirical analysis, we characterize errors as a forest-structured Forest of Errors (FoE) and conclude that FoE makes the First the Best, which is underpinned by rigorous theoretical analysis. Leveraging these insights, we propose RED, a self-guided efficient reasoning framework comprising two components: I) Refining First, which suppresses FoE growth in the first solution; and II) Discarding Subs, which prunes subsequent FoE via dual-consistency. Extensive experiments across five benchmarks and six backbone models demonstrate that RED outperforms eight competitive baselines, achieving performance gains of up to 19.0% while reducing token consumption by 37.7% ~ 70.4%. Moreover, comparative experiments on FoE metrics shed light on how RED achieves effectiveness.

ACL 2026

FoE: Forest of Errors Makes the First Solution the Best in Large Reasoning Models

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.

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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. 
[Full Message from General Chair Philipp Koehn](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QiJFOmMjvDgsDo3i1XzlQnImxe3RU_Cy/view?usp=sharing) 
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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.

While reasoning-enhanced large language models perform strongly on English medical tasks, a persistent multilingual gap remains, with substantially weaker reasoning in local languages, limiting equitable global medical deployment. To bridge this gap, we introduce Med-CoReasoner, a language-informed co-reasoning framework that elicits parallel English and local-language reasoning, abstracts them into structured concepts, and integrates local clinical knowledge into an English logical scaffold via concept-level alignment and retrieval. This design combines the structural robustness of English reasoning with the practice-grounded expertise encoded in local languages. To evaluate multilingual medical reasoning beyond multiple-choice settings, we construct MultiMed-X, a benchmark covering seven languages with expert-annotated long-form question answering and natural language inference tasks, comprising 350 instances per language. Experiments across three benchmarks show that Med-CoReasoner improves multilingual reasoning performance by an average of 5%, with particularly substantial gains in low-resource languages. Moreover, model distillation and expert evaluation analysis further confirm that Med-CoReasoner produces clinically sound and culturally grounded reasoning traces.

MED-COREASONER: Reducing Language Disparities in Medical Reasoning via Language-Informed Co-Reasoning

Continual learning (CL) for large language models (LLMs) aims to enable sequential knowledge acquisition without catastrophic forgetting. Memory replay methods are widely used for their practicality and effectiveness, but most rely on fixed, step-based heuristics that often misalign with the model’s actual learning progress, since identical training steps can result in varying degrees of parameter change. Motivated by recent findings that LLM forgetting mirrors the Ebbinghaus human forgetting curve, we propose FOREVER (FORgEtting curVe-inspired mEmory Replay), a novel CL framework that aligns replay schedules with a model-centric notion of time. FOREVER defines model time using the magnitude of optimizer updates, allowing forgetting curve-inspired replay intervals to align with the model’s internal evolution rather than raw training steps. Building on this approach, FOREVER incorporates a forgetting curve-based replay scheduler to determine when to replay and an intensity-aware regularization mechanism to adaptively control how to replay. Extensive experiments on three CL benchmarks and models ranging from 0.6B to 13B parameters demonstrate that FOREVER consistently mitigates catastrophic forgetting.

FOREVER: Forgetting Curve-Inspired Memory Replay for Language Model Continual Learning

Long-term conversational memory is a core capability for LLM-based
dialogue systems, yet existing benchmarks and evaluation protocols
primarily focus on surface-level factual recall.
In realistic interactions, appropriate responses often depend on
implicit constraints such as user state, goals, or values that are not
explicitly queried later.
To evaluate this setting, we introduce \textbf{LoCoMo-Plus}, a benchmark
for assessing cognitive memory under cue--trigger semantic disconnect,
where models must retain and apply latent constraints across long
conversational contexts.
We further show that conventional string-matching metrics and explicit
task-type prompting are misaligned with such scenarios, and propose a
unified evaluation framework based on constraint consistency.
Experiments across diverse backbone models, retrieval-based methods, and
memory systems demonstrate that cognitive memory remains challenging and
reveals failures not captured by existing benchmarks.
Our code and evaluation framework are publicly available at https://github.com/xjtuleeyf/Locomo-Plus.

Locomo-Plus: Beyond-Factual Cognitive Memory Evaluation Framework for LLM Agents

Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly rely on agentic capabilities—iterative retrieval, tool use, and decision-making—to overcome the limits of static, parametric knowledge. Yet existing agentic frameworks treat external information as unstructured text and fail to leverage the topological dependencies inherent in real-world data. To bridge this gap, we introduce Agentic Graph Learning (AGL), a paradigm that reframes graph learning as an interleaved process of topology-aware navigation and LLM-based inference. Specifically, we propose AgentGL, the first reinforcement learning (RL)–driven framework for AGL. AgentGL equips an LLM agent with graph-native tools for multi-scale exploration, regulates tool usage via search-constrained thinking to balance accuracy and efficiency, and employs a graph-conditioned curriculum RL strategy to stabilize long-horizon policy learning without step-wise supervision. Across diverse Text-Attributed Graph (TAG) benchmarks and multiple LLM backbones, AgentGL substantially outperforms strong GraphLLMs and GraphRAG baselines, achieving absolute improvements of up to 17.5% in node classification and 28.4% in link prediction. These results demonstrate that AGL is a promising frontier for enabling LLMs to autonomously navigate and reason over complex relational environments. The code is publicly available at \url{ https://github.com/sunyuanfu/AgentGL}.

AgentGL: Towards Agentic Graph Learning with LLMs via Reinforcement Learning

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have been increasingly used as automatic evaluators—a paradigm known as *MLLM-as-a-Judge*. However, their reliability and vulnerabilities to biases remain underexplored. We find that many MLLM judges fail to reliably integrate key visual or textual cues, yielding unreliable evaluations when evidence is missing or mismatched, and exhibiting instability under semantically irrelevant perturbations. To address this, we systematically define *Compositional Bias* in MLLM-as-a-Judge systems and introduce **MM-JudgeBias**, a benchmark for evaluating it. MM-JudgeBias introduces controlled perturbations across Query, Image, and Response, and evaluates model behavior via two complementary metrics: *Bias-Deviation (BD)* for sensitivity and *Bias-Conformity (BC)* for stability. Our dataset of over 1,800 curated and refined multimodal samples, drawn from 29 source benchmarks, enables a fine-grained diagnosis of nine bias types across diverse tasks and domains. Experiments on 26 state-of-the-art MLLMs reveal systematic modality neglect and asymmetric evaluation tendencies, underscoring the need for more reliable judges.

MM-JudgeBias: A Benchmark for Evaluating Compositional Biases in MLLM-as-a-Judge

In recent years, low-rank adaptation (LoRA) has emerged as a significant paradigm that freezes pre-trained weights and introduces small, learnable adapters instead of fine-tuning the full set of parameters. In this work, we uncover several key insights regarding the $\textit{singular}$ components of network parameters based on Singular Value Decomposition (SVD).
Firstly, the $\textit{principal}$ singular components with large singular values in pre-trained network parameters can be effectively reused during fine-tuning, whereas the $\textit{minor}$ components with smaller singular values are more task-specific and require substantial adaptation. Secondly, we first establish the theoretical connection that the uncontrolled growth of singular values in LoRA adapters leads to the forgetting of pre-trained knowledge — a well-known issue referred to as $\textit{catastrophic forgetting}$.
Building on these observations, we propose $\textbf{SCLoRA}$, which injects parameterized singular components with spectral clipping into the pre-trained model in a way that is aware of the spectral distribution of the pre-trained model. $\textbf{SCLoRA}$ effectively adapts to new tasks by focusing updates on components that require adaptation, while simultaneously alleviating catastrophic forgetting. We conduct extensive experiments and demonstrate that $\textbf{SCLoRA}$ not only improves downstream performance but also effectively retains pre-trained knowledge.

Can Spectral-Clipping Enable Better Learning While Forgetting Less for Low-Rank Adaptation?

Accurate assessment of critical thinking is historically limited by the Intention Behavior Gap in psychology: the disconnect between what individuals self-reported disposition and their actual practical behaviors. We try to bridge this gap with MASA (Multi-Agent Scenario-based Assessment), a framework that operationalizes cognitive assessment into an interpretable and interactive multi-agent workflow with Assessment Chain-of-Thought (AsCoT). Validating on both large-scale simulations (N=1,161) and human participants (N=70), we find that MASA aligns better with human expert ratings (r=0.882) than traditional gold-standard inventories (r=0.720), with an average cost of only $0.41 per participant. These results suggest that by shifting from self-report inventory to behavior-grounded dialogue, MASA offers a more accurate, cost-effective, and transparent solution for real-world cognitive evaluation.

 Beyond Self-Report: Bridging the Intention-Behavior Gap in Critical Thinking Assessment via Interpretable Multi-Agent System

Recent Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have achieved remarkable progress, yet their evaluation still relies on a narrow paradigm: evaluating one question at a time. This single-question setup suffers from two major limitations: (1) vulnerability to data contamination and diminishing difficulty, forcing costly creation of new questions with significant human effort, (2) failure to evaluate models under multi-context pressure, a key requirement for real-world deployment. To bridge this gap, we present **REST** (Reasoning Evaluation through Simultaneous Testing), a stress-testing framework that exposes LRMs to multiple problems simultaneously. Beyond basic reasoning, REST evaluates two under-tested capabilities: *contextual priority allocation* and *robustness against contextual interference*. Our evaluation of more than **30** advanced reasoning models on **9** reasoning benchmarks reveals several striking findings: Even state-of-the-art (SOTA) models such as ***DeepSeek-R1 exhibit substantial performance degradation under stress testing***, challenging the prevailing assumption that "LLMs are multi-problem solvers". Crucially, ***REST demonstrates stronger discriminative power*** than existing benchmarks, revealing performance gaps among models that exhibit similar, near-ceiling performance under traditional evaluation. Some key insights emerge from our analysis: (1) the ***"overthinking trap"*** is a critical factor contributing to the performance degradation; (2) models trained with the ***"Long2Short" technique preserve more of their single-problem accuracy*** under REST, outperforming their standard-trained counterparts. These results establish REST as a cost-efficient, future-proof evaluation paradigm while reducing reliance on continuous human annotation. Code is available at https://github.com/opendatalab/REST.

REST: Stress Testing Large Reasoning Models by Asking Multiple Problems at Once

Large Vision–Language Models (LVLMs) increasingly rely on retrieval to answer knowledge-intensive multimodal questions. Existing benchmarks overlook conflicts between visual and textual evidence and the importance of generating deflections (e.g., "Sorry, I cannot answer...") when retrieved knowledge is incomplete. These benchmarks also suffer from rapid obsolescence, as growing LVLM training sets allow models to answer many questions without retrieval. We address these gaps with three contributions. First, we propose a dynamic data curation pipeline that preserves benchmark difficulty over time by filtering for genuinely retrieval-dependent samples. Second, we introduce VLM-DeflectionBench, a benchmark of 2,775 samples spanning diverse multimodal retrieval settings, designed to probe model behaviour under conflicting or insufficient evidence. Third, we define a fine-grained evaluation protocol with four scenarios that disentangle parametric memorization from retrieval robustness. Experiments across 20 state-of-the-art LVLMs indicate that models usually fail to deflect in the presence of noisy or misleading evidence. Our results highlight the need to evaluate not only what models know, but how they behave when they do not, and serve as a reusable and extensible benchmark for reliable KB-VQA evaluation. All resources will be publicly available upon publication.

Benchmarking Deflection and Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models

Existing hierarchical text classification (HTC) methods typically use prompt tuning or contrastive learning to inject the label hierarchy into a model as prior knowledge to implicitly learn label embeddings for classification. However, such implicit learning fails to accurately reflect label geometry (i.e., feature spatial distribution of label embeddings), as it does not model hierarchy-aware geometric relations among labels. To address this issue, we propose a novel two-stage label geometry structuring and aligning framework, termed LGSA, which transforms the label hierarchy from an implicit prior into an explicit embedding. First, we propose a hierarchical geometric structuring (HGS) module that leverages a general orthogonal frame (GOF) to reconstruct an explicit label geometry conforming to the label hierarchy. The label geometry is then treated as a label prototype to guide model training. To facilitate the guidance, we thereby propose a hierarchical geometric aligning (HGA) module as a regularization term to align label geometry learned by the model with the explicit label prototype. Experiments on three real-world HTC datasets confirm that LGSA consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods. The code and models are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/LGSA-1E0C.

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MED-COREASONER: Reducing Language Disparities in Medical Reasoning via Language-Informed Co-Reasoning

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