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The GPT-4 technical report suggests that downstream performance can be predicted from pre-training signals, but offers little methodological detail on how to quantify this. This work address this gap by modeling knowledge retention, the capacity of a pre-trained language model to memorize factual information from its corpus, and introduce a principled method to estimate it prior to training. We propose Size-dependent Mutual Information (SMI), an information-theoretic predictor that integrates knowledge frequency, knowledge specificity, and model size to forecast closed-book question answering (QA) accuracy. SMI is validated through large-scale document retrieval over the disclosed pre-training corpora of 21 public and 3 custom models, combined with a robust multi-template QA evaluation. Experiments show that SMI significantly outperforms repetition-based baselines and achieves R² &gt; 0.7 in predicting QA accuracy for models above 1B parameters, without additional training. The analysis further reveals diminishing returns from scaling data and model size and provides evidence for an intrinsic upper bound on knowledge retention achievable by pre-training alone, motivating retrieval and other augmentation strategies.

ACL 2026

Beyond Scaling: Measuring and Predicting the Upper Bound of Knowledge Retention in Language Model Pre-Training

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ACL-IJCNLP 2021

The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP).

The GPT-4 technical report suggests that downstream performance can be predicted from pre-training signals, but offers little methodological detail on how to quantify this. This work address this gap by modeling knowledge retention, the capacity of a pre-trained language model to memorize factual information from its corpus, and introduce a principled method to estimate it prior to training. We propose Size-dependent Mutual Information (SMI), an information-theoretic predictor that integrates knowledge frequency, knowledge specificity, and model size to forecast closed-book question answering (QA) accuracy. SMI is validated through large-scale document retrieval over the disclosed pre-training corpora of 21 public and 3 custom models, combined with a robust multi-template QA evaluation. Experiments show that SMI significantly outperforms repetition-based baselines and achieves R² > 0.7 in predicting QA accuracy for models above 1B parameters, without additional training. The analysis further reveals diminishing returns from scaling data and model size and provides evidence for an intrinsic upper bound on knowledge retention achievable by pre-training alone, motivating retrieval and other augmentation strategies.

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.

The rapid expansion of the Model Context Protocol (MCP) ecosystem introduces a combinatorially complex tool space, rendering existing frameworks inadequate for comprehensive agent evaluation. To address this problem, we propose SGVEF-LOOP, a coverage-guided framework for progressive topological exploration and fact-augmented metamorphic testing. SGVEF operates via a synergistic closed loop: it navigates sparse regions using adaptive sampling, synthesizes oracle-free metamorphic pairs grounded in static knowledge, enforces dual-constraint validation to ensure consistency and solvability, and leverages execution feedback to iteratively optimize exploration. Deploying this framework yields a high-fidelity benchmark achieving 100% node coverage and saturating 80.54% of the theoretical transition bound (estimated via Chao1). Evaluation of 8 diverse MCP Agents reveals capability stratification and exposes critical behavioral anomalies---such as reasoning instability---that conventional metrics fail to capture. Consequently, this work establishes a generalizable paradigm for scalable, rigorous agent evaluation in dynamic environments.

SGVEF-LOOP: Coverage-Guided Progressive Topological Exploration and Fact-Grounded Metamorphic Evaluation for MCP Agents

Long-term memory enables large language model (LLM) agents to support personalized and sustained interactions.
However, most work on personalized agents prioritizes utility and user experience, treating memory as a neutral component and largely overlooking its safety implications.
In this paper, we reveal intent legitimation, a previously underexplored safety failure in personalized agents, where benign personal memories bias intent inference and cause models to legitimize inherently harmful queries.
To study this phenomenon, we introduce PS-Bench, a benchmark designed to identify and quantify intent legitimation in personalized interactions.
Across multiple memory-augmented agent frameworks and base LLMs, personalization increases attack success rates by **15.8%–243.7%** relative to stateless baselines.
We further provide mechanistic evidence for intent legitimation from internal representation space, and propose a lightweight detection–reflection method that effectively reduces safety degradation.
Overall, our work provides the first systematic exploration and evaluation of intent legitimation as a safety failure mode that naturally arises from benign, real-world personalization, highlighting the importance of assessing safety under long-term personal context. **WARNING:** This paper may contain harmful content.

When Personalization Legitimizes Risks: Uncovering Safety Vulnerabilities in Personalized Dialogue Agents

Hyperparameters are critical to LLM reinforcement learning (RL), but existing hyperparameter optimization (HPO) methods remain inefficient in this area, due to the massive model scale and resource-intensive training cycles. In this paper, we propose Joint Fidelity Hyperparameter Optimization (JF-HPO), which simultaneously adapts both model size and training budget as fidelity. JF-HPO is empowered by: (i) a small proxy model of the target LLM for efficient training and evaluation in each HPO trial; (ii) several carefully designed early-stopping strategies based on training dynamics; (iii) an efficient checkpointing mechanism to eliminate redundant computations. JF-HPO significantly improves the computational efficiency of each trial (up to 14.9$\times$) compared with existing HPO methods, thus achieving better predictive accuracy in most cases under the same time budget. Notably, JF-HPO delivers performance improvements ranging from 5.8\% to 111.6\% over VeRL Recipe.

Efficient Hyperparameter Optimization for LLM Reinforcement Learning

Tool-using agents based on Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in tasks such as mathematical reasoning and multi-hop question answering. However, in long trajectories, agents often trigger excessive and low-quality tool calls, increasing latency and degrading inference performance, making managing tool-use behavior challenging. In this work, we conduct entropy-based pilot experiments and observe a strong positive correlation between entropy reduction and high-quality tool calls. Building on this finding, we propose using entropy reduction as a supervisory signal and design two reward strategies to address the differing needs of optimizing tool-use behavior. Sparse outcome rewards provide coarse, trajectory-level guidance to improve efficiency, while dense process rewards offer fine-grained supervision to enhance performance. Experiments across diverse domains show that both reward designs improve tool-use behavior: the former reduces tool calls by 72.07% compared to the average of baselines, while the latter improves performance by 22.27%. These results position entropy reduction as a key mechanism for enhancing tool-use behavior, enabling agents to be more adaptive in real-world applications.

Rethinking the Role of Entropy in Optimizing Tool-Use Behaviors for Large Language Model Agents

Multi-modal knowledge graph completion (MMKGC) aims to discover missing facts in multi-modal knowledge graphs (MMKGs) by leveraging both structural relationships and diverse modality information of entities. Existing MMKGC methods follow two multi-modal paradigms: fusion-based and ensemble-based. Fusion-based methods employ fixed fusion strategies, which inevitably leads to the loss of modality-specific information and a lack of flexibility to adapt to varying modality relevance across contexts. In contrast, ensemble-based methods retain modality independence through dedicated sub-models but struggle to capture the nuanced, context-dependent semantic interplay between modalities. To overcome these dual limitations, we propose a novel MMKGC method M-Hyper, which achieves the coexistence and collaboration of fused and independent modality representations. Our method integrates the strengths of both paradigms, enabling effective cross-modal interactions while maintaining modality-specific information. Inspired by ``quaternion'' algebra, we utilize its four orthogonal bases to represent multiple independent modalities and employ the Hamilton product to efficiently model pair-wise interactions among them. Specifically, we introduce a Fine-grained Entity Representation Factorization (FERF) module and a Robust Relation-aware Modality Fusion (R2MF) module to obtain robust representations for three independent modalities and one fused modality. The resulting four modality representations are then mapped to the four orthogonal bases of a biquaternion for comprehensive modality interaction. Extensive experiments indicate its state-of-the-art performance with better robustness.

Collaboration of Fusion and Independence: Hypercomplex-driven Robust Multi-Modal Knowledge Graph Completion

Multi-agent systems (MAS) built on large language models promise improved problem-solving through collaboration, yet they often fail to consistently outperform strong single-agent baselines due to error propagation at inter-agent message handoffs. In this work, we conduct a systematic empirical analysis of such failures and introduce an edge-level error taxonomy that identifies four dominant error types: Data Gap, Signal Corruption, Referential Drift, and Capability Gap, as primary sources of failure in multi-agent interactions. Building on this taxonomy, we propose AgentAsk, a lightweight clarification module designed to intervene at the edge level in MAS to prevent cascading errors. The module operates by strategically applying minimal clarifications at critical points within the system, improving the accuracy and efficiency of the overall task. AgentAsk is trained to balance the trade-offs between clarification cost, latency, and accuracy, while it is also architecture-agnostic and can be easily integrated into existing systems. Evaluated across five benchmarks, AgentAsk consistently improves accuracy by up to 4.69%, while keeping latency and extra costs below 10% compared to baseline MAS, showcasing its high efficiency and minimal overhead. The code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/AgentAsk-3432.

AgentAsk: Multi-Agent Systems Need to Ask

Embodied agents have successfully leveraged large language models (LLMs) to better transform human instructions and images into executable task plans. Furthermore, memories of agents can be leveraged to achieve continual self-learning and optimization. However, vector data quality problems emerge in memories when they are projected into vector space, especially in discerning contextually similar but semantically conflicting sentences and highly similar images. This is particularly detrimental to embodied AI as it potentially distorts the robot’s actions. To address this challenge, we propose Conflict Detection Rules (CDRs) to identify and manage data quality issues in vector knowledge bases, which assist in correcting the index structure and further improving the answer quality. Experimental results show that planners with CDRs exceed the basic LLM planner by 15.25% and 14.25% in grammatical accuracy (GA) and interpretation accuracy (IA) on average, respectively. Moreover, the entire workflow has been successfully integrated into various scenarios, demonstrating its practical applicability and robustness in the real world.

Conflict-Aware Memory for Embodied Agents: Enhancing Vector Data Quality via Detection Rules

Multimodal Large Language Models typically assume linguistic context invariably enhances visual understanding. We study this assumption in semantic adversarial scenarios, specifically magic tricks, where narration deliberately diverges from physical reality. We introduce MagicBench, a diagnostic benchmark of 402 videos for evaluating MLLMs under hierarchical linguistic interference, together with a Physical Constraint Set (PCS) protocol for assessing adherence to physical laws. Evaluation uncovers a Semantic Dependency Paradox: (1) Semantic anchoring: Entity nouns act as anchors aiding localization, paradoxically boosting performance despite false predicates. (2) Visual Agency Loss: In semantic vacuums, multimodal performance collapses 12.4% (p < 0.01) below the vision-only "capability probe". This gap persists under symmetric prompting, suggesting a form of functional perception suppression in which autonomous visual search may be under-utilized in multimodal settings without linguistic triggers. Causal interventions via spatial prompting and signal magnification provide evidence that internal reasoning remains functional, supporting the interpretation of a perceptual access bottleneck. Our findings suggest MLLMs function as "language-guided passive observers", advocating for perceptually-independent architectures that decouple sensory agency from linguistic dominance. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/Ink-Dawn/MagicBench

MagicBench: Diagnosing Visual Agency Loss and Semantic Dependency in Multimodal LLMs

The rapid advance of automatic survey generation (ASG) has created a critical evaluation challenge. Existing evaluation methods suffer from both cognitive dimensional simplification and methodological unreliability, primarily due to the over-reliance on the ''LLM-as-a-Judge'' approach. To bridge this gap, we establish Bloom-Eval, a six-tiered benchmark based on Bloom's Taxonomy that reliably evaluates ASG systems by prioritizing deterministic algorithms and introducing our GRADE approach for abstract abilities. Furthermore, we construct a large-scale, cross-disciplinary dataset of over 3,000 high-quality papers. Our empirical study on this benchmark reveals that while leading ASG systems are proficient format organizers, they remain unqualified knowledge integrators. This work aims to redefine ASG evaluation standards, shifting the research focus from the formal mimicry of surface structure to the cognitive deepening of intellectual content. Our method provides the ASG field with a systematic, reproducible, and theoretically grounded benchmark to guide future research.

Bloom-Eval: A Hierarchical Evaluation Benchmark for Automatic Survey Generation Based on Bloom's Taxonomy

Temporal Knowledge Graph Question Answering (TKGQA) aims to answer temporal questions using knowledge from Temporal Knowledge Graphs (TKGs).
Existing LLM-based TKGQA methods typically utilize RAG-based or Agent-based paradigms, yet both struggle to construct reliable temporal evidence chains. 
RAG-based approaches primarily rely on semantic retrieval to fetch question-relevant contexts but overlook the structural dependencies within TKGs, leading to broken evidence chains, whereas iterative agents are prone to error propagation during multi-step reasoning.
To address these limitations, we propose TECQA, a framework designed to construct temporal evidence chains for LLM reasoning. 
Firstly, TECQA employs structure-guided subgraph retrieval to capture structural dependencies and intermediate reasoning paths. 
Subsequently, it utilizes a k-nearest temporal neighbor pruning strategy to filter irrelevant noise while strictly preserving the continuous local history surrounding critical events. 
Finally, the retained temporal neighbors are serialized by temporal proximity to explicitly reconstruct a coherent temporal evidence chain. Extensive experiments on MultiTQ and CronQuestions demonstrate that TECQA achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming strong baselines by 45.3\% particularly on complex queries. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/SimonsLiu/TECQA}.

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SGVEF-LOOP: Coverage-Guided Progressive Topological Exploration and Fact-Grounded Metamorphic Evaluation for MCP Agents

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