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Hallucination in large language models (LLMs) continues to be a significant issue, particularly in tasks like question answering, where models often generate plausible yet incorrect or irrelevant information. Although various methods have been proposed to mitigate hallucinations, the relationship between attention patterns and hallucinations has not been fully explored. In this paper, we analyze the distribution of attention scores across each layer and attention head of LLMs, revealing a common and intriguing phenomenon: Shallow layers of LLMs primarily rely on uniform attention patterns, where the model distributes its attention evenly across the entire sequence. This uniform attention pattern can lead to hallucinations, as the model fails to focus on the most relevant information. To mitigate this issue, we propose a training-free method called \textcolor{red}{\textbf{A}}ttention \textcolor{red}{\textbf{R}}eplacement \textcolor{red}{\textbf{T}}echnique (ART), which replaces these uniform attention patterns in the shallow layers with local attention patterns. This change directs the model to focus more on the relevant contexts, thus reducing hallucinations. Through extensive experiments, ART demonstrates significant reductions in hallucinations across multiple LLM architectures, proving its effectiveness and generalizability without requiring fine-tuning or additional training data.

ACL 2026

 ART: Attention Replacement Technique to Improve Factuality in LLMs

# Welcome everyone to ACL 2022!

The 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics is taking place May 22-27, 2022 as a hybrid event, in Dublin and online. We are happy to welcome all of you to this anniversary edition with an almost 50-50 in-person and virtual participation. 
The main conference program features oral presentations, in-person and virtual posters and demo sessions, a plenary session for our best paper presentations and awards, three amazing keynote events and two new initiatives of invited talks: Spotlight Talks for Young Rising Stars (STIRS) and The Next Big Idea Talks. Posters (including Findings of ACL 2022) and demos are grouped by areas for both the in-person and the virtual sessions. For the virtual component, the talks will be on Zoom and the posters and the demos will be in GatherTown. The Student Research Workshop will have an oral session and a poster session as part of Poster Session 1. The program also features eight Tutorials and 28 Workshops. 

 
We wish you a wonderful conference! 
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ACL 2022

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing (NLP). 

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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.

Text-to-image generation models suffer from alignment problems, where generated images fail to accurately capture the objects and relations in the text prompt. Prior work has focused on improving alignment by refining the diffusion process, ignoring the role of the text encoder, which guides the diffusion. In this work, we investigate how semantic information is distributed across token representations in text-to-image prompts, analyzing it at two levels: (1) in-item representation—whether individual tokens represent their lexical item (i.e., a word or expression conveying a single concept), and (2) cross-item interaction—whether information flows between tokens of different lexical items. We use patching techniques to uncover encoding patterns, and find that information is usually concentrated in only one or two of the item's tokens; for example, in the item "San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge", the token "Gate" sufficiently captures the entire expression while the other tokens could effectively be discarded. Lexical items also tend to remain isolated; for instance, in the prompt "a green dog", the token "dog" encodes no visual information about "green". However, in some cases, items do influence each other's representation, often leading to misinterpretations—e.g., in the prompt "a pool by a table", the token "pool" represents a "pool table" after contextualization. Our findings highlight the critical role of token-level encoding in image generation, and demonstrate that simple interventions at the encoding stage can substantially improve alignment and generation quality.

 Follow the Flow: On Information Flow Across Textual Tokens in Text-to-Image Models

Most LLM safety work studies single-agent models, but many real applications rely on multiple interacting agents. In these systems, prompt segmentation and inter-agent routing create attack surfaces that single-agent evaluations miss. We study \emph{conjunctive prompt attacks}, where a trigger key in the user query and a hidden adversarial template in one compromised remote agent each appear benign alone but activate harmful behavior when routing brings them together. We consider an attacker who changes neither model weights nor the client agent and instead controls only trigger placement and template insertion. Across star, chain, and DAG topologies, routing-aware optimization substantially increases attack success over non-optimized baselines while keeping false activations low. Existing defenses, including PromptGuard, Llama-Guard variants, and system-level controls such as tool restrictions, do not reliably stop the attack because no single component appears malicious in isolation. These results expose a structural vulnerability in agentic LLM pipelines and motivate defenses that reason over routing and cross-agent composition. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/UCF-ML-Research/ConjunctiveAgents}.

Conjunctive Prompt Attacks in Multi-Agent LLM Systems

Agentic reinforcement learning enables large language models to solve long-horizon tasks by interacting with the environment and internalizing tool-use behavior into their reasoning. Prior work assigns supervision primarily based on outcome rewards or external reward models, but largely ignores environment observations, a critical source of learning. Consequently, agents may identify successful actions without understanding how the environment responds, producing suboptimal policies. To address this, we propose SOAR (Supervision from Observation for Agentic Reinforcement Learning), which assigns positive advantages to observation tokens proportional to the negative entropy of preceding actions. This encourages the agent to learn from outcomes of confident actions, grounding policy updates in environment dynamics and improving anticipation of tool-call consequences. Empirical results across three domains and 14 benchmarks show that SOAR improves performance, yielding gains of up to 7.0% on general reasoning tasks and 16.9% on deep research tasks, while reducing erroneous and inefficient tool usage.

SOAR: Supervision from Observation for Agentic Reinforcement Learning

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance across a wide range of mathematical benchmarks. However, concerns remain as to whether these successes reflect genuine reasoning or superficial pattern recognition. Existing evaluation methods, which typically focus either on the final answer or on the intermediate reasoning steps, reduce mathematical reasoning to a shallow input–output mapping, overlooking its inherently multi-stage and multi-dimensional cognitive nature. Inspired by P'olya’s problem-solving theory, we propose SMART, a benchmark that decomposes mathematical problem-solving into four cognitive dimensions: **S**emantic Understanding, **M**athematical Reasoning, **A**rithmetic Computation, and **R**eflection & Refinemen**T**, and introduces dimension-specific tasks to measure the corresponding cognitive processes of LLMs. We apply SMART to 22 state-of-the-art open- and closed-source LLMs and uncover substantial discrepancies in their capabilities across dimensions. Our findings reveal genuine weaknesses in current models and motivate a new metric, the All-Pass Score, designed to better capture true problem-solving capability.

SMART: Evaluating LLMs' Mathematical Reasoning via a Human Cognitive Process-Inspired Benchmark

Large language models are increasingly applied to various development scenarios. However, in on-chain transaction scenarios, even a minor error can cause irreversible loss for users. Existing evaluations often overlook execution accuracy and safety. We introduce EVM-QuestBench, an execution-grounded benchmark for natural-language transaction-script generation on EVM-compatible chains. The benchmark employs dynamic evaluation: instructions are sampled from template pools, numeric parameters are drawn from predefined intervals, and validators verify outcomes against these instantiated values. EVM-QuestBench contains 107 tasks (62 atomic, 45 composite). Its modular architecture enables rapid task development. The runner executes scripts on a forked EVM chain with snapshot isolation; composite tasks apply step-efficiency decay. We evaluate 20 models with 5 independent rounds each and find large performance gaps, with split scores revealing persistent asymmetry between single-action precision and multi-step workflow completion. Code: \url{https://github.com/OpenEdgeHQ/EVM-quest-bench}.

EVM-QuestBench: An Execution-Grounded Benchmark for Natural-Language Transaction Code Generation

Simulating human-like Theory of Mind (ToM) has been a longstanding problem in natural language processing (NLP). To address this, existing works introduce a reasoning step of event hiding (a.k.a. perspective-taking), where events unknown to a character are removed before question answering. However, resorting to event hiding for ToM reasoning presents a performance degradation issue due to the strict output format constraints involved in event hiding. To mitigate this issue, we propose generating perspective-taking outputs as free-form explanations without event hiding, but this poses a notable yet underexplored challenge: LLMs need to inhibit responses to events unknown to characters, because the absence of event hiding exposes LLMs to these events throughout reasoning. To address this challenge, we hypothesize and empirically verify that LLMs can achieve such inhibition if a character’s lack of knowledge about events is made explicit during reasoning. Based on this finding, we introduce PICTURE, a new prompting method that enables LLMs to generate a character's lack of knowledge within free-form Chain-of-Thought (CoT). Experimental results show that PICTURE outperforms existing prompting methods by an average of 7.3% on false-belief tasks.

PICTURE: Enhancing Theory-of-Mind in Large Language Models by Revealing, Not Hiding, Characters' Lack of Knowledge

Cognitive distortions have been closely linked to mental health disorders, yet their automatic detection remains challenging due to contextual ambiguity, co-occurrence, and semantic overlap. We propose a novel framework that combines Large Language Models (LLMs) with a Multiple-Instance Learning (MIL) architecture to enhance interpretability and expression-level reasoning. Each utterance is decomposed into Emotion, Logic, and Behavior (ELB) components, which are processed by LLMs to infer multiple distortion instances, each with a predicted type, expression, and model-assigned salience score. These instances are integrated via a Multi-View Gated Attention mechanism for final classification. Experiments on Korean (KoACD) and English (Therapist QA) datasets demonstrate that incorporating ELB and LLM-inferred salience scores improves classification performance, especially for distortions with high interpretive ambiguity. Our results suggest a psychologically grounded and generalizable approach for fine-grained reasoning in mental health NLP. The dataset and implementation details are publicly accessible.

Multi-View Attention Multiple-Instance Learning Enhanced by LLM Reasoning for Cognitive Distortion Detection

Multilingual neural machine translation (MNMT) models degrade in performance as input context length increases, causing positional encoding schemes to misinterpret token distances. Existing absolute and relative positional encodings rely on fixed token indices and implicitly assume uniform semantic density, which breaks down for long-context inputs. We introduce DCARPE, a tokenization-aware adaptive positional encoding that conditions relative positional bias on input-level sequence length and fragmentation statistics, allowing the model to reinterpret positional distance when tokenization-induced inflation arises rather than semantic factors. Evaluations on JW300 and out-of-distribution FLORES-200 demonstrate consistent improvements in long-context robustness, achieving gains of up to \textbf{+10.81 ChrF++} and \textbf{+8.00 BLEU} over baselines.

Mitigating Tokenization-Induced Distance Distortion in Long-Context Multilingual Machine Translation

Video misinformation detection is often approached as a binary veracity classification problem, overlooking the complex reasoning required to explain how and why content misleads. Existing benchmarks fail to capture the diversity of manipulation strategies, such as AI-generated edits and out-of-context manipulation, and do not evaluate whether models can provide process-level justifications for their judgments. We address these limitations with MisVideoQA, a multi-turn benchmark designed to assess comprehensive understanding and reasoning in video misinformation analysis. MisVideoQA covers 12 fine-grained deception categories and evaluates models along six dimensions, progressing from perceptual attribution to intent and persuasion analysis. Recognizing that standard MLLMs struggle to sustain such structured, evidence-based deduction, we propose MisAgent, a Delphi-inspired multi-agent framework in which specialized agents collaboratively integrate multimodal cues with external evidence. Experimental results show that state-of-the-art multimodal large language models perform poorly on MisVideoQA, while MisAgent consistently improves reasoning accuracy and explanation quality. Together, our benchmark and framework establish a unified foundation for reliable, interpretable, and evidence-grounded video misinformation analysis.

From Detection to Understanding: Multi-Turn Reasoning for Video Misinformation Analysis

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) is a promising approach for improving the complex reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). However, current RLVR methods face two significant challenges: the near-miss reward problem, where a small mistake can invalidate an otherwise correct reasoning process, greatly hindering training efficiency; and exploration stagnation, where models tend to focus on solutions within their ''comfort zone'', lacking the motivation to explore potentially more effective alternatives. To address these challenges, we propose StepHint, a novel RLVR algorithm that utilizes multi-level stepwise hints to help models explore the solution space more effectively. StepHint partitions valid reasoning chains into reasoning steps using our proposed adaptive partitioning method. The initial few steps are used as hints, and simultaneously, multiple-level hints (each comprising a different number of steps) are provided to the model. This approach directs the model's exploration toward a promising solution subspace while preserving its flexibility for independent exploration. By providing hints, StepHint mitigates the near-miss reward problem, thereby improving training efficiency. Additionally, the external reasoning pathways help the model develop better reasoning abilities, enabling it to move beyond its ''comfort zone'' and mitigate exploration stagnation. StepHint outperforms competitive RLVR enhancement methods across six mathematical benchmarks and two out-of-domain benchmarks.

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Follow the Flow: On Information Flow Across Textual Tokens in Text-to-Image Models

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