United States

Discrete Diffusion Language Models have emerged as a compelling paradigm for unified multimodal generation, yet their deployment is hindered by high inference latency arising from iterative decoding. Existing acceleration strategies often require expensive re-training or fail to leverage the 2D spatial redundancy inherent in visual data. To address this, we propose Locality-Aware Dynamic Rescue (LADR), a training-free method that expedites inference by exploiting the spatial Markov property of images. LADR prioritizes the recovery of tokens at the ``generation frontier&#39;&#39;, regions spatially adjacent to observed pixels, thereby maximizing information gain. Specifically, our method integrates morphological neighbor identification to locate candidate tokens, employs a risk-bounded filtering mechanism to prevent error propagation, and utilizes manifold-consistent inverse scheduling to align the diffusion trajectory with the accelerated mask density. Extensive experiments on four text-to-image generation benchmarks demonstrate that our LADR achieves an approximate 4 $\times $ speedup over standard baselines. Remarkably, it maintains or even enhances generative fidelity, particularly in spatial reasoning tasks, offering a state-of-the-art trade-off between efficiency and quality.

ACL 2026

LADR: Locality-Aware Dynamic Rescue for Efficient Text-to-Image Generation with Diffusion Large Language Models

## Welcome to 2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics!
This year, the conference is in Mexico City. NAACL was actually already planned for Mexico City in 2021, but due to the pandemic the entire conference was moved online. This year, finally, we get to go! So it is my sincere pleasure to welcome you to Mexico City, whether in person or virtually. Having the conference in Mexico City is a good opportunity to emphasize that NAACL is our flagship conference for ACL members not only in North America but also in Central and South America, even though NAACL has been bearing “North” in its name. At this year’s conference, we have a theme to match, with a theme track on the Languages of Latin America to showcase the linguistic diversity of the region.
 
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The University of Texas at Austin 
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NAACL 2024

2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Discrete Diffusion Language Models have emerged as a compelling paradigm for unified multimodal generation, yet their deployment is hindered by high inference latency arising from iterative decoding. Existing acceleration strategies often require expensive re-training or fail to leverage the 2D spatial redundancy inherent in visual data. To address this, we propose Locality-Aware Dynamic Rescue (LADR), a training-free method that expedites inference by exploiting the spatial Markov property of images. LADR prioritizes the recovery of tokens at the ``generation frontier'', regions spatially adjacent to observed pixels, thereby maximizing information gain. Specifically, our method integrates morphological neighbor identification to locate candidate tokens, employs a risk-bounded filtering mechanism to prevent error propagation, and utilizes manifold-consistent inverse scheduling to align the diffusion trajectory with the accelerated mask density. Extensive experiments on four text-to-image generation benchmarks demonstrate that our LADR achieves an approximate 4 $\times $ speedup over standard baselines. Remarkably, it maintains or even enhances generative fidelity, particularly in spatial reasoning tasks, offering a state-of-the-art trade-off between efficiency and quality.

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.

Recent advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in interpreting single medical images. However, real-world clinical diagnosis is intrinsically a multi-view process, requiring the synthesis of information across volumetric slices, temporal sequences, and comparative modalities. Existing benchmarks fail to capture this complexity, limiting the assessment of models in realistic clinical workflows. To bridge this gap, we introduce MedMultiBench, the first large-scale benchmark specifically designed for medical multi-image understanding. Comprising 11,392 expert-curated samples, MedMultiBench evaluates MLLMs across four distinct dimensions: Joint Reasoning, Comparative Analysis, Comprehensive Perception, and In-Context Learning. We benchmark 13 state-of-the-art MLLMs, revealing that while current models excel in single-view tasks, they struggle significantly with multi-image contexts. Our experiments identify a performance degradation in open-source models when processing increased visual loads, whereas closed-source models demonstrate better scalability. MedMultiBench provides a robust framework to facilitate the development of MLLMs capable of holistic clinical reasoning.

Beyond Single View: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Medical Multimodal Large Language Models on Multi-Image Understanding

LLM-based Multi-agent systems (MAS) have shown strong capabilities across a wide range of domains. 
Their success largely hinges on the collaboration topology design, which has emerged as a central research focus in the automated MAS design.
However, existing approaches are fundamentally constrained by their reliance on homogeneous LLMs, which significantly limits overall system intelligence.
In response to this limitation, we for the first time propose the concept of **Automated Design of Heterogeneous-LLMs-based MAS (ADHM)**.
ADHM sheds light on a promising avenue for advancing collective intelligence, which focuses on the automated design of cost-effective MAS composed of diverse LLMs
and roles to suit various queries.
Toward this challenging goal, we propose **Hetero-Designer**, a novel pipeline that efficiently encodes intricate dependencies among queries, LLMs and roles through a novel Binary-Star Transformer and constructs Hetero-MAS in an autoregressive graph generation process. Extensive experiments demonstrate that **Hetero-Designer** is: (1) high-performing on various benchmarks, (2) economical in reducing overhead, (3) extensible to unseen LLMs and roles.

Hetero-Designer: Automated Design of Multi-Agent Systems with Heterogeneous LLMs

Financial numerical reasoning demands rigorous adherence to domain-specific logic and precise evidence foundation. However, large language models (LLMs) are prone to forced generation when confronting ambiguous evidence or complex recursive dependencies, often hallucinating values to bridge information gaps. To address this, we propose graph-bounded financial reasoning (GBFR), a neuro-symbolic framework that imposes semantic and structural constraints via a financial metric knowledge graph (FMKG). Unlike sequential generation paradigms, our approach employs a parallel graph-constrained reasoning algorithm that orchestrates specialized operators to simultaneously explore heterogeneous derivation paths of complex financial metrics. Through cross-path verification, the framework aggregates only semantically consistent results, ensuring reasoning is bounded by available context. Crucially, this approach enables safe abstention by distinguishing genuine data absence from retrieval failure, thereby preventing ungrounded fabrication. To evaluate this capability, we further construct counterfactual samples by perturbing entities, times, and metrics to synthesize unanswerable scenarios. Empirical evaluations on standard benchmarks demonstrate that GBFR significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.

Achieving Multi-Hop Calculation and Safe Abstention in Financial Numerical Reasoning by Metric Graph Constrained LLMs

Agentic workflows are commonly used to guide large language models in solving complex reasoning tasks. However, existing automated workflow generation methods primarily rely on stepwise local refinement or tree-based search over a single evolving workflow. Under limited optimization budgets, this paradigm constrains structural depth, hindering the discovery of workflows that require deep compositional structure. To address this limitation, we propose FusionFlow, a framework centered on workflow fusion. Unlike incremental refinement, fusion enables structural leaps by synthesizing multiple independently evolved workflows, allowing exploration of deeper regions of the workflow space within a finite budget. To make fusion effective, FusionFlow integrates local optimization, task-specific differentiation, and a dynamic scheduling mechanism. Experiments on six reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that FusionFlow consistently outperforms existing automated workflow generation methods. Further ablation and analysis confirm that fusion is the key driver of deep structural exploration, highlighting fusion-driven exploration as an effective approach for overcoming depth limitations in automated workflow generation.

FusionFlow: Enabling Deep Structural Exploration for Automated Agentic Workflow Generation

High-quality, large-scale audio captioning is crucial for advancing audio understanding, yet current automated methods often generate captions that lack fine-grained detail and contextual accuracy, primarily due to their reliance on limited unimodal or superficial multimodal information. Drawing inspiration from human auditory perception, which adeptly integrates cross-modal cues and performs sophisticated auditory scene analysis, we introduce a novel two-stage automated pipeline. This pipeline first employs specialized pretrained models to extract diverse contextual cues (e.g., speech, music, general sounds, and visual information from associated video). A large language model (LLM) then synthesizes these rich, multimodal inputs to generate detailed and context-aware audio captions. Key contributions of this work include: (1) the proposed scalable method for fine-grained audio caption generation; (2) FusionAudio, a new large-scale dataset comprising 1.2 million such detailed captions, combined with 6 million QA pairs; and (3) enhanced audio models developed using FusionAudio, specifically a CLAP-based audio encoder with superior audio-text alignment and instruction following. This paper paves the way for more nuanced and accurate automated understanding of complex audio environments.

Towards Fine-grained Audio Captioning with Multimodal Contextual Fusion

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate exceptional capability across diverse tasks. However, their deployment in long-context scenarios is hindered by two challenges: computational inefficiency and redundant information. We propose RAM (Read As HuMan), a context compression framework that adopts an adaptive hybrid reading strategy, to address these challenges. Inspired by human reading behavior (i.e., close reading important content while skimming less relevant content), RAM partitions the context into segments and encodes them with the input query in parallel. High-relevance segments are fully retained (close reading), while low-relevance ones are query-guided compressed into compact summary vectors (skimming). Both explicit textual segments and implicit summary vectors are concatenated and fed into decoder to achieve both superior performance and natural language format interpretability. To refine the decision boundary between close reading and skimming, we further introduce a contrastive learning objective based on positive and negative query–segment pairs. Experiments demonstrate that RAM outperforms existing baselines on multiple question answering and summarization benchmarks across two backbones, while delivering up to a 12x end-to-end speedup on long inputs (average length 16K; maximum length 32K).

Read As Human: Compressing Context via Parallelizable Close Reading and Skimming

Recent advances in generative AI have significantly enhanced the realism of multimodal media manipulation, thereby posing substantial challenges to manipulation detection. Existing manipulation detection and grounding approaches predominantly focus on manipulation type classification under result-oriented supervision, which not only lacks interpretability but also tends to overfit superficial artifacts. In this paper, we argue that generalizable detection requires incorporating explicit forensic reasoning, rather than merely classifying a limited set of manipulation types, which fails to generalize to unseen manipulation patterns. To this end, we propose **REFORM**, a reasoning-driven framework that shifts learning from outcome fitting to process modeling. REFORM adopts a three-stage curriculum that first induces forensic rationales, then aligns reasoning with final judgments, and finally refines logical consistency via reinforcement learning. To support this paradigm, we introduce **ROM**, a large-scale dataset with rich reasoning annotations. Extensive experiments show that REFORM establishes new state-of-the-art performance with superior generalization, achieving 81.52% ACC on ROM, 76.65% ACC on DGM4, and 74.9 F1 on MMFakeBench.

Cultivating Forensic Reasoning for Generalizable Multimodal Manipulation Detection

Visual hallucination remains a major obstacle to the reliability of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs). We argue that this issue originates from a fundamental statistical misspecification: the conventional softmax attention implicitly assumes i.i.d. noise, yet real LVLM attention patterns exhibit structured and competitive biases (e.g., attention sinks) that violate this assumption. To address this mismatch, we introduce Latent Attention Denoising (LAD), a principled and training-free framework that recasts attention calibration as a one-step score-based denoising process. LAD employs an interpretable energy function to derive an analytic score and applies a single Langevin-inspired update to actively steer corrupted attention logits toward more faithful configurations. This intervention imposes negligible computational overhead and operates at a speed comparable to standard greedy decoding. Extensive evaluations across diverse architectures confirm that LAD achieves superior performance on both generative and discriminative tasks, effectively mitigating hallucinations while maintaining efficiency comparable to standard decoding.

Latent Attention Denoising: A Training-Free Energy-Based Framework for Mitigating Hallucinations in Vision-Language Models

Knowledge graphs (KGs) provide a structured representation of real-world facts as triples consisting of entities and their relationships. With the rapid progress of large language models (LLMs), recent studies increasingly explore LLMs for end-to-end KG construction from text. In particular, generative knowledge extraction (GKE) builds KGs by directly generating structured triples from documents. However, generation errors are inevitable, and the resulting KGs often contain triples that do not align with the facts expressed in the source text. To address these issues, we propose GraphRefine, a framework that performs triple-level refinement on KGs constructed via GKE. We first analyze factual inconsistencies that arise in GKE and categorize their types based on a human evaluation. We then construct training data reflecting these types and fine-tune an LLM as a KG refiner. Given a draft KG, the fine-tuned refiner selects a refinement operation for each triple and, if needed, deletes, edits, or rewrites it to reduce factual inconsistencies. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GraphRefine goes beyond deletion-only approaches and improves KG quality from diverse perspectives.

LLMs as Knowledge Graph Refiners: Mitigating Factual Inconsistencies in Generative Knowledge Extraction

Events exhibit rich semantic relations that are essential for understanding the unfolding of real-world processes. Although large language models (LLMs) have achieved strong performance on event relation extraction, how event relations are internally represented and utilized remains unclear. In this paper, we present UERLens, an interpretability framework for understanding event relations in LLMs. Specifically, we first construct UERBench, a counterfactual dataset for event relation analysis that covers causal, temporal, and sub-event relations. Based on counterfactual pairs, we identify relation-sensitive internal features by comparing model activations. We then examine the functional role of these features through model manipulation, including model intervention and model training. Experimental results show that event relations are encoded through structured and layer-specific internal features. Disabling relation-sensitive features leads to performance drops of over 22%, while enhancing them yields improvements of up to 7%. Furthermore, leveraging these interpretable features to train a lightweight classifier significantly improves event relation extraction, achieving F1 gains of up to 24% for causal relations.

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Beyond Single View: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Medical Multimodal Large Language Models on Multi-Image Understanding

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Next from ACL 2026

Beyond Single View: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Medical Multimodal Large Language Models on Multi-Image Understanding

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LaDiC: Are Diffusion Models Really Inferior to Autoregressive Counterparts for Image-to-Text Generation?

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

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