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While recent studies show the effectiveness of in-context learning (ICL) for tabular data prediction, they also reveal significant fairness issues in large language models (LLMs). Prior work to mitigate fairness issues often employs interventions relying on subjective demonstration selection. Its effectiveness varies significantly with the specific demonstration content, leading to low controllability. Moreover, the improvement of fairness is highly unstable across different models and tasks. To address the challenges of low controllability and limited stability in fairness interventions, we propose Fairness-Aware Context-Contrastive Decoding (Fair-CCD). Fair-CCD first constructs Structural Bias Templates (SBTs), motivated by behavioral patterns observed in demonstrations, to encode the relationship between sensitive attributes and predicted labels in a structured and controllable form. During inference, Fair-CCD injects multiple SBTs and contrasts the model’s responses, generating two differential signals that guide fairness adjustment and preserve task performance. By leveraging attention signals to scale decoding adjustments guided by the difference signals, Fair-CCD achieves stable and adaptive bias mitigation across models and tasks. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that Fair-CCD consistently improves fairness metrics without degrading task accuracy.

ACL 2026

Fair-CCD: Mitigating Bias in Large Language Models for Tabular Classification Through Context-Contrastive Decoding

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-23 is the Thirty-Seventh AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The theme of this conference is to create collaborative bridges within and beyond AI. Like previous AAAI conferences, AAAI-23 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and two new activities: a Bridge Program and a Lab Program. Many of these activities are tailored to the theme of bridges and all are selected according to the highest standards, with additional programs for students and young researchers. 
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AAAI 2023

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines.

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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. 
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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.

Vision language models (VLMs) demonstrate strong zero-shot performance, but often perpetuate social stereotypes in person-centric queries, yielding skewed demographic distributions. Current debiasing methods apply uniform bias corrections across all input queries regardless of their bias sensitivity, creating a fundamental fairness–utility trade-off. Strong debiasing distorts semantically meaningful information in bias-insensitive queries, while weak debiasing fails to mitigate stereotypes in bias-sensitive ones. This one-size-fits-all approach hampers simultaneously achieving high utility on bias-insensitive queries and fairness on bias-sensitive queries. We introduce Reward-Gated Test-Time Adaptation (RG-TTA), a reinforcement learning-based test-time adaptation framework that selectively applies debiasing based on input sensitivity. RG-TTA adaptively triggers fairness regularization based on the bias sensitivity of each input during test-time policy adaptation, while focusing exclusively on optimizing cross-modal alignment for bias-insensitive inputs. Experiments on fairness benchmarks (e.g., FairFace, UTKFace) demonstrate substantial bias reduction while simultaneously improving zero-shot utility, resolving the trade-off of uniform debiasing.

Selective Test-Time Debiasing for CLIP via Reward Gating

The evolution paradigm of Large Language Models (LLMs) is shifting from scaling training compute to scaling inference-time compute. While Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has become a key engine for this transition, standard approaches often fail to equip models with the autonomous improvement capabilities required for test-time scaling. Existing critique-guided methods attempt to mitigate this by leveraging external feedback or ground-truth signals; however, these dependencies are unavailable at test time, fundamentally limiting the model's capacity for continuous self-improvement. To bridge this gap, we propose CURE (Critique-driven Unified REinforcement Learning), a framework that jointly optimizes a single policy for standard solving, critiquing, and guided re-exploration. Uniquely, CURE facilitates re-exploration by generating strategic hints while discarding initial incorrect solutions to mitigate anchoring bias.
Empirical results across diverse mathematical reasoning and code generation benchmarks demonstrate that CURE not only maintains competitive single-turn performance but, more importantly, unlocks effective inference-time scaling, enabling the model to significantly boost accuracy through iterative self-improvement.

CURE: Critique-Driven Unified Reinforcement Learning for Test-Time Self-Improvement

Multilingual large language models (LLMs) have minimized the fluency gap between languages. This advancement, however, exposes models to the risk of biased behavior, as knowledge and norms may propagate across languages. In this work we aim to quantify models' inter- and intra-lingual biases, via their ability to answer locale-ambiguous questions. To this end, we present LocQA, a test set containing 2,156 questions in 12 languages, referring to various locale-dependent facts such as laws, dates, and measurements. The questions do not contain indications of the locales they relate to, other than the querying language itself. LLMs' responses to LocQA locale-ambiguous questions thus reveal models' implicit priors. We used LocQA to evaluate 32 models, and detected two types of structural biases. Inter-lingually, we show a global bias towards answers relevant to the US-locale, even when models are asked in languages other than English. Moreover, we discovered that this global bias is exacerbated in models that underwent instruction tuning, compared to their base counterparts. Intra-lingually, we show that when multiple locales are relevant for the same language, models act as demographic probability engines, prioritizing locales with larger populations. Taken together, insights from LocQA may help in shaping LLMs' desired local behavior, and in quantifying the impact of various training phases on different kinds of biases.

 Location Not Found: Exposing Implicit Local and Global Biases in Multilingual LLMs

Training expert LLMs in domains with scarce fine-grained annotated data is admittedly challenging, often relying on multiple-choice questions (MCQs). However, standard outcome-based reinforcement learning (RL) on MCQs is risky. While outcome-based RL may improve accuracy, it frequently compromises the reasoning process, yielding internally inconsistent rationales that diverge from the final predictions. Existing solutions to supervise the reasoning process, such as large-scale Process Reward Models (PRMs), are prohibitively expensive. To address this, we propose \textsc{CLARity}, a cost-effective RL framework that enhances reasoning quality using a small, general-purpose LLM only. \textsc{CLARity} integrates a consistency-aware reward mechanism with a 2-stage refine-then-monitor training pipeline to enhance reasoning consistency, and a dynamic data reformulation strategy to better exploit annotated data available. Experiments demonstrate that \textsc{CLARity} can improve the consistency of responses by 16.5\% over standard outcome-based RL, and bring an improvement of 7.5\% in final accuracy. Human evaluations further confirm substantial gains in factual correctness and reasoning coherence, leading to more trustworthy model outputs. Thus, \textsc{CLARity} offers a generalizable solution that enables smaller models to effectively guide expert LLM training by monitoring reasoning consistency.

CLARity: Reasoning Consistency Alone Can Teach Reinforced Experts

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on chain-of-thought (CoT) trajectories demonstrations is a common approach for enabling reasoning in large language models. Standard practices typically only retain trajectories with correct final answers (*positives*) while ignoring the rest (*negatives*). We argue that this paradigm discards substantial supervision and exacerbates overfitting, limiting out-of-domain (OOD) generalization. Specifically, we surprisingly find that incorporating *negative* trajectories into SFT yields substantial OOD generalization gains over *positive-only* training, as these trajectories often retain valid intermediate reasoning despite incorrect final answers. To understand this effect in depth, we systematically analyze data, training dynamics, and inference behavior, identifying 22 recurring patterns in negative chains that serve a dual role: they moderate loss descent to mitigate overfitting during training and boost policy entropy by 35.67% during inference to facilitate exploration. Motivated by these observations, we further propose **Gain-based LOss Weighting** (GLOW), an adaptive, sample-aware scheme that exploits such distinctive training dynamics by rescaling per-sample loss based on inter-epoch progress. Empirically, GLOW efficiently leverages unfiltered trajectories, yielding a 5.51% OOD gain over positive-only SFT on Qwen2.5-7B and boosting MMLU from 72.82% to 76.47% as an RL initialization. Code is available at [Github](https://github.com/Eureka-Maggie/GLOW).

Learning from Mistakes: Negative Reasoning Samples Enhance Out-of-Domain Generalization

Large language models (LLMs) sometimes exhibit language confusion when generating non-English text. Existing approaches typically rely on fine-tuning to mitigate this issue. In contrast, we propose a tuning-free paradigm for reducing language confusion. Within this paradigm, we introduce two methods: Language-Aware Token Boosting (LATB), which applies targeted perturbations to tokens associated with the desired language, and Adaptive Language-Aware Token Boosting (Adaptive-LATB), which dynamically adjusts these perturbations based on the model’s confidence in the intended language. Experiments demonstrate that our methods effectively improve multilingual alignment by reducing language confusion, while maintain the summarization quality without requiring any additional fine-tuning. Our code is publicly available.\footnote{\url{https://github.com/scbdatax/genai-datax-language-aware-token-boosting}}.

 Language-Aware Token Boosting: LLM Language Confusion Reduction Without Tuning

Large language models solve complex tasks by generating long reasoning chains, achieving higher accuracy at the cost of increased computational cost and reduced ability to isolate functionally relevant reasoning. Prior work on compact reasoning shortens such chains through probabilistic sampling, heuristics, or supervision from frontier models, but offers limited insight into whether models internally encode token-level functional importance for answer generation. We address this gap diagnostically and propose greedy pruning, a likelihood-preserving deletion procedure that iteratively removes reasoning tokens whose removal minimally degrades model likelihood under a specified objective, yielding length-controlled reasoning chains. We evaluate pruned reasoning in a distillation framework and show that students trained on pruned chains outperform a frontier-model–supervised compression baseline at matched reasoning lengths. Finally, our analysis reveals systematic pruning patterns and shows that attention scores can predict greedy pruning ranks, further suggesting that models encode a nontrivial functional importance structure over reasoning tokens.

Do LLMs Encode Functional Importance of Reasoning Tokens ?

Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate highly persuasive text, raising concerns about their misuse for propaganda, manipulation, and other harmful purposes. This leads us to our central question: Is LLM-generated persuasion more difficult to automatically detect than human-written persuasion? To address this, we categorize controllable generation approaches for producing persuasive content with LLMs and introduce Persuaficial, a high-quality multilingual benchmark covering six languages: English, German, Polish, Italian, French and Russian. Using this benchmark, we conduct extensive empirical evaluations comparing human-authored and LLM-generated persuasive texts. We find that although overtly persuasive LLM-generated texts can be easier to detect than human-written ones, subtle LLM-generated persuasion consistently degrades automatic detection performance. Beyond detection performance, we provide the first comprehensive linguistic analysis contrasting human and LLM-generated persuasive texts, offering insights that may guide the development of more interpretable and robust detection tools.

Can AI-Generated Persuasion Be Detected? Persuaficial Benchmark and AI vs. Human Linguistic Differences

Users often rely on Large Language Models (LLMs) for processing multiple documents or performing analysis over a number of instances. For example, analysing the overall sentiment of a number of movie reviews requires an LLM to process the sentiment of each review individually in order to provide a final aggregated answer. While LLM performance on such individual tasks is generally high, there has been little research on how LLMs perform when dealing with multi-instance inputs. In this paper, we perform a
comprehensive evaluation of the multi-instance processing (MIP) ability of LLMs for tasks in which they excel individually. The results show that all LLMs follow a pattern of slight performance degradation for small numbers of instances ($\approx$20–100), followed by a performance collapse on larger instance counts. Crucially, our analysis shows that while context length is associated with this degradation, the number of instances has a stronger effect on the final results. This finding suggests that when optimising LLM performance for MIP, attention should be paid to both context length and, in particular, instance count.

 Understanding LLM Performance Degradation in Multi-Instance Processing: The Roles of Instance Count and Context Length

LLMs are increasingly deployed in dynamic, real-world settings, where the distribution of user prompts can shift substantially over time as new tasks, prompts, and users are introduced to a deployed model. Such natural prompt distribution shift poses a major challenge to LLM reliability, particularly for specialized models designed for narrow domains or user populations. Despite attention to out-of-distribution robustness, there is very limited exploration of measuring natural prompt distribution shift in prior work, and its impact on deployed LLMs remains poorly understood. We introduce the LLM Evaluation under Natural prompt Shift (LENS) framework: a data-centric approach for quantifying natural prompt distribution shift and evaluating its effect on the performance of deployed LLMs. We perform a large-scale evaluation using 192 real-world post-deployment prompt shift settings over time, user group, and geographic axes, training a total of 81 models on 4.68M training prompts, and evaluating on 57.6k prompts. We find that even moderate shifts in user prompt behavior correspond with large performance drops (73% average loss) in deployed LLMs. This performance degradation is particularly prevalent when users from different latent groups and geographic regions interact with models and is correlated with natural prompt distribution shift over time. We systematically characterize how LLM instruction following ability degrades over time and between user groups. Our findings highlight the critical need for data-driven monitoring to ensure LLM performance remains stable across diverse and evolving user populations.

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Selective Test-Time Debiasing for CLIP via Reward Gating

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