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As Large Language Model (LLM) alignment evolves from simple completions to complex, highly sophisticated generation, Reward Models are increasingly shifting toward rubric-guided evaluation to mitigate surface-level biases. However, the community lacks a unified benchmark to assess this evaluation paradigm, as existing benchmarks lack both the discriminative complexity and the ground-truth rubric annotations required for rigorous analysis. To bridge this gap, we introduce RubricBench, a curated benchmark with 1,147 pairwise comparisons specifically designed to assess the reliability of rubric-based evaluation. Our construction employs a multi-dimensional filtration pipeline to target hard samples featuring nuanced input complexity and misleading surface bias, augmenting each with expert-annotated, atomic rubrics derived strictly from instructions. Comprehensive experiments reveal a substantial capability gap between human-annotated and model-generated rubrics, indicating that even state-of-the-art models struggle to autonomously specify valid evaluation criteria, lagging considerably behind human-guided performance.

ACL 2026

RubricBench: Aligning Model-Generated Rubrics with Human Standards

#### *Message from the General Chair, Aline Villavicencio*
I’m delighted and honoured to welcome you to the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL 2026), taking place in the beautiful city of Rabat, in Morocco, in March 24-29, 2026. EACL is the flagship European conference of the Association and EACL 2026 proudly continues our field’s tradition of excellence in scholarship, innovation, and inclusivity. I am deeply grateful to the many volunteers whose dedication, generosity, and tireless efforts have made this conference possible.
For the first time EACL is being hosted in the African continent. This is an important milestone for our community, and we are grateful to our Moroccan hosts for enabling this historic moment by bringing this edition of EACL to Rabat. We are also delighted that the Second Arabic NLP School is co-located with EACL. We hope attendees enjoy this wonderful opportunity to strengthen ties with the Computational Linguistics communities across the African continent. *[Read full message](https://drive.google.com/file/d/14NlmHvwM6fPJuMmOvVh7K0vtQbEyv3SZ/view?usp=sharing)*<br><br>

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EACL 2026

Welcome to the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL). EACL 2026 will be held in Rabat, Morocco, from March 24–29, 2026. 

poster

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

Large language models (LLMs) excel at general-purpose tasks, yet adapting their responses to individual users remains challenging. Retrieval augmentation provides a lightweight alternative to fine-tuning by conditioning LLMs on user history records, and existing approaches typically select these records based on semantic relevance. We argue that relevance serves as an unreliable proxy for utility: a record may be semantically similar to a query yet fail to improve generation quality or even degrade it due to redundancy or conflicting information. To bridge this gap, we propose PURPLE, a contextual bandit framework that oPtimizes UseR Profiles for LLM pErsonalization. In contrast to a greedy selection of the most relevant records, PURPLE treats profile construction as an order-sensitive generation process and utilizes a Plackett-Luce ranking model to capture complex inter-record dependencies. By training with semantically rich feedback provided by the likelihood of the reference response, our method aligns retrieval directly with generation quality. Extensive experiments on nine personalization tasks demonstrate that PURPLE consistently outperforms strong heuristic and retrieval-augmented baselines in both effectiveness and efficiency, establishing a principled and scalable solution for optimizing user profiles.

 Optimizing User Profiles via Contextual Bandits for Retrieval-Augmented LLM Personalization

Evaluating the factual consistency of abstractive text summarization remains a significant challenge, particularly for long documents, where conventional metrics struggle with input length limitations and long-range dependencies. In this work, we systematically evaluate the reliability of six widely used reference-free factuality metrics, originally proposed for short-form summarization, in the long-document setting. We probe metric robustness through seven factuality-preserving perturbations applied to summaries, namely paraphrasing, simplification, synonym replacement, logically equivalent negations, vocabulary reduction, compression, and source text insertion, and further analyze their sensitivity to retrieval context and claim information density. Across three long-form benchmark datasets spanning science fiction, legal, and scientific domains, our results reveal that existing short-form metrics produce inconsistent scores for semantically equivalent summaries and exhibit declining reliability for information-dense claims whose content is semantically similar to many parts of the source document. While expanding the retrieval context improves stability in some domains, no metric consistently maintains factual alignment under long-context conditions. Finally, our results highlight concrete directions for improving factuality evaluation, including multi-span reasoning, context-aware calibration, and training on meaning-preserving variations to enhance robustness in long-form summarization.

Stress Testing Factual Consistency Metrics for Long-Document Summarization

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in utilizing external tools. In practice, however, LLMs are often exposed to tools that are irrelevant to the user's query, in which case the desired behavior is to refrain from invocations. In this work, we identify a widespread yet overlooked mechanistic flaw in tool refusal, which we term structural alignment bias: Even when a tool fails to serve the user's goal, LLMs still tend to invoke it whenever query attributes can be validly assigned to tool parameters. To systematically study this bias, we introduce SABEval, a new dataset that decouples structural alignment from semantic relevance. Our analysis shows that structural alignment bias induces severe tool-invocation errors in LLMs, yet remains largely unaccounted for in existing evaluations. To investigate the internal mechanisms underlying this bias, we propose Contrastive Attention Attribution, which reveals two competing pathways for semantic checking and structural matching. The relative strength of these pathways drives LLMs' tool invocation decisions. Based on these findings, we further introduce a rebalancing strategy that effectively mitigates structural alignment bias, as demonstrated by extensive experiments, without degrading general tool-use capabilities.

 Do LLMs Know Tool Irrelevance? Demystifying Structural Alignment Bias in Tool Invocations

Scaling laws have enabled predictable compute allocation for pre-training and for RL in reasoning tasks. However, research on retrieval reinforcement generation (RAG) remains insufficient and there is a lack of fundamental understanding of the interaction between retrieval quality and reinforcement learning computation. We present the first systematic study of RL scaling for RAG across three knowledge-intensive benchmarks. We introduce the Retrieval Bottleneck Hypothesis and derive sigmoidal scaling laws showing that retrieval quality, not RL compute, determines the asymptotic performance ceiling. Our analysis reveals three principles: (1) retrieval quality bounds achievable performance, with improving retrieval yielding larger gains than algorithmic innovations; (2) design choices (training objectives, rewards, off-policy methods) primarily modulate compute efficiency, with secondary effects on the ceiling that are substantially smaller than retrieval quality improvements; and (3) stable configurations enable extrapolation with 3.1% error at 4x compute. We further uncover RAG-specific dynamics: optimal document count increases with training, and RL algorithm effectiveness depends critically on retrieval quality. These insights yield RAG-ScaleRL, achieving strong performance on knowledge-intensive benchmarks while providing the predictable scaling long available for pre-training but previously absent in RAG-RL.

 The Retrieval Bottleneck: Scaling Laws for Reinforcement Learning in RAG

Summarizing deeply nested discussion threads requires handling interleaved replies, quotes, and overlapping topics, which standard LLM summarizers struggle to capture reliably. We introduce $ThreadSumm$, a multi-stage LLM framework that treats thread summarization as a hierarchical reasoning problem over explicit aspect and content unit representations. Our method first performs content planning via LLM-based extraction of discourse aspects and Atomic Content Units, then applies sentence ordering to construct thread-aware sequences that surface multiple viewpoints rather than a single linear strand. On top of these interpretable units, $ThreadSumm$ employs a Tree of Thoughts search that generates and scores multiple paragraph candidates, jointly optimizing coherence and coverage within a unified search space. With this multi-proposal and iterative refinement design, we show improved performance in generating logically structured summaries compared to existing baselines, while achieving higher aspect retention and opinion coverage in nested discussions.

ThreadSumm: Summarization of Nested Discourse Threads Using Tree of Thoughts

LLMs are ubiquitous in modern NLP, and while their applicability extends to texts produced for democratic activities such as online deliberations or large-scale citizen consultations, ethical questions have been raised for their usage as analysis tools. We continue this line of research with two main goals: (a) to develop resources that can help standardize citizen contributions in public forums at the \textbf{pragmatic level}, and make them easier to use in topic modeling and political analysis; (b) to study how well this standardization can reliably be performed by small, open-weights LLMs, \emph{i.e.} models that can be run locally and transparently with limited resources. Accordingly, we introduce \textbf{Corpus Clarification} as a preprocessing framework for large-scale consultation data that transforms noisy, multi-topic contributions into structured, self-contained argumentative units ready for downstream analysis. We present \textbf{GDN-CC}, a manually-curated dataset of 1,231 contributions to the French \textit{Grand Débat National}, comprising 2,285 argumentative units annotated for argumentative structure and manually clarified. 
We then show that finetuned Small Language Models match or outperform LLMs on reproducing these annotations, and measure their usability for an opinion clustering task. We finally release \textbf{GDN-CC-large}, an automatically annotated corpus of 240k contributions, the largest annotated democratic consultation dataset to date.

The GDN-CC Dataset: Automatic Corpus Clarification for AI-enhanced Democratic Citizen Consultations

Speculative Decoding has emerged as a popular technique for accelerating inference in Large Language Models. However, most existing approaches yield only modest improvements in production serving systems. Methods that achieve substantial speedups typically rely on an additional trained draft model or auxiliary model components, increasing deployment and maintenance complexity. This added complexity reduces flexibility, particularly when serving workloads shift to tasks, domains, or languages that are not well represented in the draft model’s training data.

We introduce Simply-Scalable Speculative Decoding (SSSD), a training-free method that combines lightweight n-gram matching with hardware-aware speculation. Relative to standard autoregressive decoding, SSSD reduces latency by up to 2.9×. It achieves performance on par with leading training-based approaches across a broad range of benchmarks, while requiring substantially lower adoption effort---no data preparation, training or tuning are needed---and exhibiting superior robustness under language and domain shift, as well as in long-context settings.

 SSSD: Simply-Scalable Speculative Decoding

Key-Value (KV) cache compression techniques have improved the efficiency of long-context summarization in Large Language Models (LLMs), but their impact on model hallucination remains underexplored. In this paper, we present the first systematic study of how KV cache compression affects hallucination in long-context summarization, demonstrating that aggressive compression can increase hallucination scores by up to 3.36× compared to the baseline. To mitigate this issue, we propose HalluKV, a decoding-phase strategy that selectively removes generated KV pairs from retrieval heads responsible for retrieving critical information from source context, thereby anchoring their attention on the preserved source information. Our approach maintains computational efficiency while significantly reducing hallucination across multiple models and datasets, achieving up to 5.48 average point reductions on Llama-3-8B-Instruct, enabling more trustworthy long-context summarization.

Anchoring the Cache: Mitigating Contextual Hallucination in KV-Compressed Long-Context Summarization

Test-time scaling evaluates reasoning LLMs by sampling multiple outputs per prompt, but ranking models in this regime remains underexplored. We formalize dense benchmark ranking under test-time scaling and introduce Scorio, a library that implements statistical ranking methods such as paired-comparison models, item response theory (IRT) models, voting rules, and graph- and spectral-based methods. Across 20 reasoning models on four Olympiad-style math benchmarks (AIME'24, AIME'25, HMMT'25, and BrUMO'25; up to N = 80 trials), most full-trial rankings agree closely with the Bayesian gold standard Bayes_𝒰@80 (mean Kendall's τ_b = 0.93–0.95), and 19–34 methods recover exactly the same ordering. In the single-trial regime, the best methods reach τ_b ≈ 0.86.

Using greedy decoding as an empirical prior (Bayes_R₀@N) reduces variance at N = 1 by 16–52%, but can bias rankings when greedy and stochastic sampling disagree. These results identify reliable ranking methods for both high- and low-budget test-time scaling. We release Scorio as an open-source library at https://github.com/mohsenhariri/scorio.

Ranking Reasoning LLMs under Test-Time Scaling

The growing demand for automated writing assistance in diverse academic domains highlights the need for robust Chinese Grammatical Error Correction (CGEC) systems that can adapt across disciplines. However, existing CGEC research largely lacks dedicated benchmarks for multi-disciplinary academic writing, overlooking continual learning (CL) as a promising solution to handle domain-specific linguistic variation and prevent catastrophic forgetting. To fill this crucial gap, we introduce CL$^2$GEC, the first Continual Learning benchmark for Chinese Literature Grammatical Error Correction, designed to evaluate adaptive CGEC across multiple academic fields. Our benchmark includes 10,000 human-annotated sentences spanning 10 disciplines, each exhibiting distinct linguistic styles and error patterns. CL$^2$GEC focuses on evaluating grammatical error correction in a continual learning setting, simulating sequential exposure to diverse academic disciplines to reflect real-world editorial dynamics. We evaluate large language models under sequential tuning, parameter-efficient adaptation, and four representative CL algorithms, using both standard GEC metrics and continual learning metrics adapted to task-level variation. Experimental results reveal that regularization-based methods mitigate forgetting more effectively than replay-based or naive sequential approaches. Our benchmark provides a rigorous foundation for future research in adaptive grammatical error correction across diverse academic domains.

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Optimizing User Profiles via Contextual Bandits for Retrieval-Augmented LLM Personalization

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