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Estimating the cognitive complexity of reading comprehension (RC) items is crucial for assessing item difficulty before it is administered to learners. Unlike syntactic and semantic features, such as passage length or semantic similarity between options, cognitive features that arise during answer reasoning are not readily extractable using existing NLP tools and have traditionally relied on human annotation. In this study, we examine whether large language models (LLMs) can estimate the cognitive complexity of RC items by focusing on two dimensions—Evidence Scope and Transformation Level—that indicate the degree of cognitive burden involved in reasoning about the answer. Our experimental results demonstrate that LLMs can approximate the cognitive complexity of items, indicating their potential as tools for prior difficulty analysis. Further analysis reveals a gap between LLMs’ reasoning ability and their metacognitive awareness: even when they produce correct answers, they sometimes fail to correctly identify the features underlying their own reasoning process.

ACL 2026

Can LLMs Estimate Cognitive Complexity of Reading Comprehension Items?

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.

technical paper

Developing agents capable of navigating fragmented, multi-source information remains challenging, primarily due to the scarcity of benchmarks reflecting hybrid workflows combining database querying with external APIs. To bridge this gap, we introduce ReCoQA, a large-scale benchmark of 29,270 real-estate instances featuring machine-verifiable supervision for intermediate steps, including structured intent labels, SQL queries, and API calls. Complementarily, we propose HIRE-Agent, a hierarchical framework instantiating an understand–plan–execute architecture as a strong baseline. By orchestrating a Front-end parser, a planning Supervisor, and execution Specialists, HIRE-Agent effectively integrates heterogeneous evidence. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HIRE-Agent constitutes a strong baseline and substantiates the necessity of hierarchical collaboration for complex, real-world reasoning tasks.

ReCoQA: A Benchmark for Tool-Augmented and Multi-Step Reasoning in Real Estate Question and Answering

Large Language Model (LLM) agents struggle with ultra-long-horizon tasks requiring hundreds or thousands of interaction steps. Traditional context management approaches face a fundamental dilemma: preserving complete histories rapidly exhausts context windows and forces crude truncation, while aggressive summarization discards critical information prematurely. We propose Predictive Adaptive Context Extraction (PACE), a novel framework that reconceptualizes context management as a Next Step Prediction problem. Inspired by neural attention, PACE dynamically constructs context by adjusting historical memory granularity based on its predicted relevance for the next action. Comprehensive evaluation across diverse benchmarks and models demonstrates that PACE consistently improves task success rates, with larger gains on complex tasks and robust cross-lingual performance. Crucially, PACE enables agents to sustain effective reasoning for 4,897 interaction steps in ultra-long-horizon scenarios, achieving a 66.2
improvement over the full-context ReAct baseline and 5.1
over advanced folding baselines. This fundamentally advances the capability of LLM-based agents in previously intractable long-horizon scenarios. Our code and data are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/PACE-B000/.

PACE: Predictive Adaptive Context Extraction for Long-Horizon LLM Agents

Inscriptions are invaluable cultural heritage, yet centuries of degradation (e.g., fractures, erosion, oxidation) have rendered many partially illegible. Existing Historical Inscription Restoration (HIR) methods rely on task-separated pipelines with irreversible error accumulation and patch-based generation that sacrifices page-level consistency. Therefore, we present UniHIR, the first unified MLLM for end-to-end historical inscription restoration. It integrates two novel designs, Draft-Guided Localization and Hierarchical Self-Refinement, to enable accurate damage localization and illegible-content prediction via iterative reasoning and self-correction. This unified approach enables true page-level restoration with consistent typography and style. To support training under high-resolution inputs and long sequences, we design UHIRFactory and construct HIRBench, enabling step-wise, memory-efficient instruction tuning with step-aware annotations for intermediate drafts and refinements. Experiments demonstrate that UniHIR achieves superior performance in both text restoration accuracy and appearance restoration quality, validating that HIR can be effectively tackled by a standalone model in a unified manner. The model and code are available at https://github.com/ZZXF11/UniHIR.

Draft, Verify, Restore: Self-Refining Historical Inscription Restoration with a Unified MLLM

Creativity has become a core competence in the era of LLMs and human–AI collaboration, underpinning innovation in real-world problem solving. Crucially, the systematic improvement of creativity necessitates scientifically valid assessment instruments. Psychometric research recognizes context-based assessment as an effective way to measure creative thinking. However, high-quality expert-designed contexts remain scarce. Existing LLM-based generators often struggle with insufficient assessment cues, weak narrative coherence, limited stylistic diversity, and poor support for creative thinking. To address these challenges, we propose AlphaContext, an evolutionary tree-based psychometric context generator for creativity assessment. First, the HyperTree Outline Planner formalizes expert-designed outlining as a rule-guided hypertree and performs top-down hierarchical planning. The MCTS-based Context Generator fills the outline via MCTS to balance global structure and local quality. Then, the Evolutionary Context Optimizer evolves contexts with MAP-Elites by repeatedly updating niche elites to jointly improve diversity and quality. Finally, the Assessment-Guided Evolution Refiner simulates virtual participants with diverse styles and recycles weak contexts for further evolution. Experiments show that AlphaContext yields an average improvement of 8\% over competitive methods across 6 quality metrics.

AlphaContext: An Evolutionary Tree-based Psychometric Context Generator for Creativity Assessment

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown strong capabilities across a broad range of benchmarks. However, most existing evaluations focus on passive inference, where models perform step-by-step reasoning under complete information. This setup is misaligned with real-world use, where seeing is not enough. This raises a fundamental question: Can MLLMs actively acquire missing evidence under incomplete information? To bridge this gap, we require the MLLMs to actively acquire missing evidence and iteratively refine decisions under incomplete information, by selecting a target image from a candidate pool without task-specific priors. To support systematic study, we propose GuessBench, a benchmark with both perception-oriented and knowledge-oriented images for evaluating active reasoning in MLLMs. We evaluate 20 superior MLLMs and find that performance on active reasoning lags far behind it on passive settings, indicating substantial room for improvement. Further analysis identifies fine-grained perception and timely decision-making as key challenges. Ablation studies show that perceptual enhancements benefit smaller models, whereas thinking-oriented methods provide consistent gains across model sizes. These results suggest promising directions for future research on multimodal active reasoning.

When Seeing Is not Enough: Revealing the Limits of Active Reasoning in MLLMs

Recent studies in difficulty-controlled reading comprehension item generation have leveraged large language models (LLMs) to produce items by adjusting difficulty-related features. However, existing methods typically rely on a single-agent prompting approach, which often fails to consistently satisfy specified feature constraints, resulting in items that deviate from the target difficulty level. To address this limitation, we introduce MAFIG, a Multi-agent Framework for Feature-constrained Item Generation, where multiple LLM agents and feature-specific evaluators collaborate to generate and iteratively revise items based on intended constraints. Furthermore, to verify the efficacy of MAFIG in difficulty control, we propose a method for constructing a sequence of feature constraint sets that yield items with monotonically increasing difficulty. Experimental results demonstrate that MAFIG generates items that adhere to target constraints at a significantly higher rate than baselines, achieving robust difficulty control through the difficulty-calibrated constraint sequence.

A Multi-Agent Framework for Feature-Constrained Difficulty Control in Reading Comprehension Item Generation

Humans acquire knowledge through three cognitive stages: perceiving information, comprehending knowledge, and adapting knowledge to solve novel problems. Videos serve as an effective medium for knowledge acquisition, facilitating a natural progression through these learning stages. However, existing video benchmarks fail to evaluate the knowledge acquisition capabilities of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs). To address this gap, we introduce Video-MMMU, a multi-modal, multi-discipline, multi-track benchmark that evaluates LMMs' ability to acquire knowledge from college-level, educational videos. Video-MMMU features a collection of 300 videos and 900 human-annotated questions across six disciplines, evaluating knowledge acquisition through stage-aligned question-answer pairs: Perception, Comprehension, and Adaptation. Beyond measuring final accuracy, Video-MMMU proposes the performance gain metric that quantifies an LMM’s learning gain from video, shifting the focus of evaluation from absolute performance to learning efficiency. Our evaluation reveals a substantial gap between human learners and current LMMs, highlighting the need to improve models' ability to learn and adapt knowledge from video content.

Video-MMMU: Evaluating Knowledge Acquisition from Multidisciplinary Professional Videos

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have excelled in textual reasoning, they struggle with mathematical domains like geometry that intrinsically rely on visual aids. Existing approaches to Visual Chain-of-Thought (VCoT) are often limited by rigid external tools or fail to generate the high-fidelity, strategically-timed diagrams necessary for complex problem-solving. To bridge this gap, we introduce MathCanvas, a comprehensive framework designed to endow unified Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) with intrinsic VCoT capabilities for mathematics. Our approach consists of two phases. First, a Visual Manipulation stage pre-trains the model on a novel 15.2M-pair corpus, comprising 10M caption-to-diagram pairs (MathCanvas-Imagen) and 5.2M step-by-step editing trajectories (MathCanvas-Edit), to master diagram generation and editing. Second, a Strategic Visual-Aided Reasoning stage fine-tunes the model on MathCanvas-Instruct, a new 219K-example dataset of interleaved visual-textual reasoning paths, teaching it when and how to leverage visual aids. To facilitate rigorous evaluation, we introduce MathCanvas-Bench, a challenging benchmark with 3K problems that require models to produce interleaved visual-textual solutions. Our model, BAGEL-Canvas, trained under this framework, achieves an 86% relative improvement over strong LMM baselines on MathCanvas-Bench, demonstrating excellent generalization to other public math benchmarks. Our work provides a complete toolkit—framework, datasets, and benchmark—to unlock complex, human-like visual reasoning in LMMs.

MathCanvas: Intrinsic Visual Chain-of-Thought for Multimodal Mathematical Reasoning

The rapid development of Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) raises concerns about watermarking for DLM-generated detection. However, existing sequential LLM watermarking cannot be directly applied to DLMs, as DLMs' generation order is arbitrary. While emerging studies adapt biased LLM watermarking to DLMs by temporarily predicting the watermark prefix, they suffer from degraded quality and unstable watermarking due to bias accumulation and prediction errors. Besides, they cannot carry multi-bit watermarks. In this paper, we propose unbiased multi-bit watermarking for DLMs. We introduce a stability-aware constraint that allows watermarking only in stable contexts and a bit-controlled, unbiased modulation to preserve the original DLM output distribution, achieving stable watermarking with minimal quality impact. To enhance detection robustness, we design a \textit{Regret-based Remasking}, which grants a ``second chance'' for unwatermarked tokens to be regenerated. It can seamlessly integrate into DLM inference with no added diffusion steps and latency. Experiments across DLMs and various tasks show that our scheme is effective, achieving superior generation quality compared to baselines while maintaining high detection accuracy and multi-bit capacity. Our code is available here https://github.com/iieSKLCSDsg/UMR.

You Can Have a Second Chance: Unbiased and Multi-bit Watermarking for Diffusion Language Models with Regret-based Remasking

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a wide range of vision-language tasks. However, their performance as embodied agents, which requires multi-round interaction with spatial reasoning and sequential action prediction, needs further exploration. Our work investigates this potential in the context of Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) by introducing a unified and extensible simulation-free evaluation framework to probe MLLMs as zero-shot agents, named VLN-MME. Simplifying the evaluation with a highly modular and accessible design streamlines experiments, enabling structured comparisons and component-level ablations across diverse MLLM architectures, agent designs, and navigation tasks. Crucially, enabled by VLN-MME, we observe that enhancing prevalent agents with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning and self-reflection leads to an unexpected performance decrease. This suggests MLLMs exhibit poor context awareness in embodied navigation tasks; although they can follow instructions and structure their output, their 3D spatial reasoning fidelity is low. Furthermore, we demonstrate that agent performance could be largely improved with simple failure cases in context learning. VLN-MME lays the groundwork for systematic evaluation of general-purpose MLLMs in embodied navigation settings and reveals limitations in their sequential decision-making capabilities. We believe these findings offer crucial guidance for MLLM post-training as embodied agents.

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ReCoQA: A Benchmark for Tool-Augmented and Multi-Step Reasoning in Real Estate Question and Answering

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Next from ACL 2026

ReCoQA: A Benchmark for Tool-Augmented and Multi-Step Reasoning in Real Estate Question and Answering

Similar lecture

Predicting Item Difficulty and Generating Reading Comprehension Items via an Annotated Repository

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

COMPANY

RESOURCES

Downloads