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Prevailing safety alignment methods still leave Large Language Models (LLMs) vulnerable to sophisticated jailbreak attacks. To bolster defenses, explicit reasoning mechanisms like Safety-oriented Chain-of-Thought (SCoT) have emerged, significantly enhancing robustness. However, this transparency introduces a critical trade-off: the exposed reasoning process itself becomes a new attack surface, risking the leakage of harmful information and revealing the model&#39;s safety logic to adversaries. This paper directly confronts this dilemma, asking: Can we achieve the full benefits of deliberative safety without the costs of explicit reasoning generation? We propose Safety Reasoning Internalization to make the deliberative process in SCoT &quot;available but not visible&quot;. This approach is grounded in a key theoretical insight: the corrective influence of an SCoT can be effectively approximated by a targeted, low-rank update to the model&#39;s Feed-Forward Network (FFN) layers. We operationalize this through Hierarchical Internalization of Adversarially-Guided Reasoning (HIAR), a layer-wise safety alignment framework that internalizes safety reasoning into an implicit computational pathway using Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA). HIAR enables the model to reach a safe conclusion within a single forward pass, entirely eliminating the need to generate vulnerable SCoT text. Extensive experiments on various LLMs demonstrate that HIAR achieves a 43\% lower Attack Success Rate (ASR) against distinct jailbreak attacks compared to strong baselines.

ACL 2026

More Thinking, Less Talking: Internalizing Deliberative Safety into LLM Parameters

## Welcome!
"I am excited to welcome you to this year’s edition of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing! Importantly, it marks the 30th edition of EMNLP. With over 8,000 submissions, more than 3,000 accepted papers, and thousands of attendees, we have come a long way from that first
workshop, which had 14 accepted papers. As the field looks ahead, Suzhou is the fitting location for celebrating this milestone: rooted in a long literary tradition, yet modern and forward-looking, and home to a large share of the NLP community." 

*Message from the General Chair, Dirk Hovy*

EMNLP 2025

Celebrate 30 Years of EMNLP! 
EMNLP 2025 will be held in Suzhou, China from November 5th to November 9th, 2025.

Prevailing safety alignment methods still leave Large Language Models (LLMs) vulnerable to sophisticated jailbreak attacks. To bolster defenses, explicit reasoning mechanisms like Safety-oriented Chain-of-Thought (SCoT) have emerged, significantly enhancing robustness. However, this transparency introduces a critical trade-off: the exposed reasoning process itself becomes a new attack surface, risking the leakage of harmful information and revealing the model's safety logic to adversaries. This paper directly confronts this dilemma, asking: Can we achieve the full benefits of deliberative safety without the costs of explicit reasoning generation? We propose Safety Reasoning Internalization to make the deliberative process in SCoT "available but not visible". This approach is grounded in a key theoretical insight: the corrective influence of an SCoT can be effectively approximated by a targeted, low-rank update to the model's Feed-Forward Network (FFN) layers. We operationalize this through Hierarchical Internalization of Adversarially-Guided Reasoning (HIAR), a layer-wise safety alignment framework that internalizes safety reasoning into an implicit computational pathway using Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA). HIAR enables the model to reach a safe conclusion within a single forward pass, entirely eliminating the need to generate vulnerable SCoT text. Extensive experiments on various LLMs demonstrate that HIAR achieves a 43\% lower Attack Success Rate (ASR) against distinct jailbreak attacks compared to strong baselines.

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

Scientific feasibility assessment asks whether a claim is consistent with established knowledge and whether experimental evidence could support or refute it. We frame feasibility assessment as a diagnostic reasoning task in which, given a hypothesis, a model predicts feasible or infeasible and justifies its decision. We evaluate large language models (LLMs) under controlled knowledge conditions (hypothesis-only, with experiments, with outcomes, or both) and probe robustness by progressively removing portions of the experimental and/or outcome context. Across multiple LLMs and two datasets, providing outcome evidence is generally more reliable than providing experiment descriptions. Outcomes tend to improve accuracy beyond what internal knowledge alone provides, whereas experimental text can be brittle and may degrade performance when the context is incomplete. These findings clarify when experimental evidence benefits LLM-based feasibility assessment and when it introduces fragility.

Experiments or Outcomes? Probing Scientific Feasibility in Large Language Models

To address toxic content on social media, we introduce SMARTER, a data-efficient 2-stage framework for explainable content moderation using Large Language Models (LLMs). In Stage 1, we leverage LLMs' own outputs to generate synthetic explanations for correct and incorrect labels, enabling preference optimization with minimal supervision. In Stage 2, we refine explanation quality through cross-model training, allowing weaker models to align with stronger ones. Experiments on 3 benchmarks (HateXplain, Latent Hate, Implicit Hate) show SMARTER achieves up to 13% macro-F1 improvement over few-shot baselines using only 6-57% of training data. Our framework offers a scalable strategy for low-data settings by harnessing LLMs' self-improvement for explainable moderation.

SMARTER: A Data-efficient Framework to Improve Toxicity Detection with Explanation via Self-augmenting Large Language Models

Deciphering ancient Chinese Oracle Bone Script (OBS) is a challenging task that offers insights into the beliefs, systems, and culture of the ancient era. Existing approaches treat decipherment as a closed-set image recognition problem, which fails to bridge the ``interpretation gap'': while individual characters are often unique and rare, they are composed of a limited set of recurring, pictographic components that carry transferable semantic meanings. To leverage this structural logic, we propose an agent-driven Vision-Language Model (VLM) framework that integrates a VLM for precise visual grounding with an LLM-based agent to automate a reasoning chain of component identification, graph-based knowledge retrieval, and relationship inference for linguistically accurate interpretation. To support this, we also introduce OB-Radix, an expert-annotated dataset providing structural and semantic data absent from prior corpora, comprising 1,022 character images (934 unique characters) and 1,853 fine-grained component images across 478 distinct components with verified explanations. By evaluating our system across three benchmarks of different tasks, we demonstrate that our framework yields more detailed and precise decipherments compared to baseline methods.

Specializing Large Models for Oracle Bone Script Interpretation via Component-Grounded Multimodal Knowledge Augmentation

The recent explosion of large language models (LLMs), each with its own general or specialized strengths, makes scalable, reliable benchmarking more urgent than ever. Standard practices nowadays face fundamental trade-offs: closed-ended question-based benchmarks (\eg MMLU) struggle with saturation as newer models emerge, while crowd-sourced leaderboards (\eg Chatbot Arena) rely on costly and slow human judges. Recently, automated methods (\eg LLM-as-a-judge) shed light on the scalability, but risk bias by relying on one or a few ``authority'' models. To tackle these issues, we propose Decentralized Arena (\dearena), a fully automated framework leveraging collective intelligence from all LLMs to evaluate each other. It mitigates single-model judge bias by democratic, pairwise evaluation, and remains efficient at scale through two key components: (1) a coarse-to-fine ranking algorithm for fast incremental insertion of new models with sub-quadratic complexity, and (2) an automatic question selection strategy for the construction of new evaluation dimensions. Across extensive experiments across 66 LLMs, \dearena attains up to 97% correlation with human judgements, while significantly reducing the cost.

Decentralized Arena: Towards Democratic and Scalable Automatic Evaluation of Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly adopted as conversational assistants in genomics, where they are mainly used to reason over biological knowledge, annotations, and analysis outputs through natural language interfaces. However, existing benchmarks either focus on specialized DNA models trained for sequence prediction or evaluate biological knowledge using text-only questions, leaving the behavior of general-purpose LLMs when directly exposed to raw genome sequences underexplored. We introduce GenomeQA, a benchmark designed to provide a controlled evaluation setting for general-purpose LLMs on sequence-based genome inference tasks. GenomeQA comprises 5,200 samples drawn from multiple biological databases, with sequence lengths ranging from 6 to 1,000 base pairs (bp), spanning six task families: Enhancer and Promoter Identification, Splice Site Identification, Taxonomic Classification, Histone Mark Prediction, Transcription Factor Binding Site Prediction, and TF Motif Prediction. Across six frontier LLMs, we find that models often outperform random baselines, particularly on tasks driven by local sequence cues such as GC content and short motifs, while performance degrades on tasks that require more indirect or multi-step inference over sequence patterns. GenomeQA establishes a diagnostic benchmark for studying and improving the use of general-purpose LLMs on raw genomic sequences.

GenomeQA: Benchmarking General Large Language Models for Genome Sequence Understanding

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models rely on an external router to assign tokens to experts. This design inherently separates the routing decision from each expert's internal capabilities, leading to suboptimal performance. In this work, we address this limitation with Union-of-Experts (UoE), an MoE variant that performs "expert-autonomous routing''. The core mechanism of UoE is to pre-designate a minute fraction of neurons within each expert as "routing neurons''. Experts autonomously select relevant tokens by comparing the activation intensity of these neurons, aligning routing decisions with each expert’s functional profile. To prevent the waste of activations from unselected experts' routing neurons, we aggregate all routing neuron outputs and sum them into the final layer output. This aggregation acts as a novel virtual shared expert whose parameters are distributed across the individual experts, and improves overall parameter efficiency. We pre-train UoE models with up to 3B parameters, demonstrating that they outperform traditional MoEs with matched efficiency. Furthermore, our analysis of the routing neurons provides valuable insights into expert-autonomous selection and the broader routing mechanisms of MoE models.

Union-of-Experts: Neurons in Mixture-of-Experts are Secretly Routers

While large language models (LLMs) have substantially improved Text-to-SQL generation, a pronounced gap remains between AI systems and human experts on challenging benchmarks such as BIRD-SQL. We argue this gap stems largely from the prevailing single-pass paradigm, which lacks the iterative reasoning, schema exploration, and error-correction behaviors that humans naturally employ. To address this limitation, we introduce SQL-Trail, a multi-turn reinforcement learning (RL) agentic framework for Text-to-SQL. Rather than producing a query in one shot, SQL-Trail interacts with the database environment and uses execution feedback to iteratively refine its predictions. Our approach centers on two key ideas: (i) an adaptive turn-budget allocation mechanism that scales the agent’s interaction depth to match question difficulty, and (ii) a composite reward panel that jointly incentivizes SQL correctness and efficient exploration. Across benchmarks, SQL-Trail sets a new state of the art and delivers strong data efficiency—up to **18×** higher than prior single-pass RL state-of-the-art methods. Notably, our 7B and 14B models outperform substantially larger proprietary systems by **5%** on average, underscoring the effectiveness of interactive, agentic workflows for robust Text-to-SQL generation.

SQL-Trail: Multi-Turn Reinforcement Learning with Interleaved Feedback for Text-to-SQL

Despite the rapid advancement of LLMs, their performance on linguistically and culturally diverse minority languages within a unified national context remains underexplored. We present CMiLBench, a collection of hierarchical multitask benchmarks designed to translate theoretical notions of “diversity in unity” into practical evaluation for three representative Chinese minority languages: Tibetan, Mongolian, and Uyghur. CMiLBench comprises 24,663 instances across 5 difficulty levels and 17 tasks spanning foundational ability, cultural specificity, and safety alignment. We adopt existing dataset adaptation, minority knowledge construction, and high-resource benchmark translation to construct CMiLBench. We assess 14 state-of-the-art commercial and open-source LLMs with a hybrid framework that integrates automatic metrics and LLM-as-a-Judge scoring. The comparative experimental results reveal the gap between theoretical capability and practical utility. CMiLBench serves as a foundational and scalable evaluation resource to bridge the digital language divide and promote the informatization and intelligentization of low-resource Chinese minority languages.

Diversity in Unity, Theory in Practice: Hierarchical Multitask Benchmarks for Chinese Minority Languages

Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly acting as human delegates in multi-agent environments, where a representative agent integrates diverse peer perspectives to make a final decision. Drawing inspiration from social psychology, we investigate how the reliability of this representative agent is undermined by the social context of its network. We define four key phenomena---social conformity, perceived expertise, dominant speaker effect, and rhetorical persuasion---and systematically manipulate the number of adversaries, relative intelligence, argument length, and argumentative styles. Our experiments demonstrate that the representative agent’s accuracy consistently declines as social pressure increases: larger adversarial groups, more capable peers, and longer arguments all lead to significant performance degradation. Furthermore, rhetorical strategies emphasizing credibility or logic can further sway the agent's judgment, depending on the context. These findings reveal that multi-agent systems are sensitive not only to individual reasoning but also to the social dynamics of their configuration, highlighting critical vulnerabilities in AI delegates that mirror the psychological biases observed in human group decision-making.

Social Dynamics as Critical Vulnerabilities that Undermine Objective Decision-Making in LLM Collectives

Developing culturally grounded multilingual AI systems remains challenging, particularly for low-resource languages. While synthetic data offers promise, its effectiveness in multilingual and multicultural contexts is underexplored. We investigate bottom-up synthetic data generation using large open-source LLMs (>= 235B parameters) grounded in language-specific Wikipedia content, complementing dominant top-down translation-based approaches from English. We introduce Updesh, a high-quality large-scale synthetic instruction-following dataset comprising 9.5M data points across 13 Indian languages and English, encompassing diverse reasoning and generative tasks emphasizing on enhancing long-context and multi-turn capabilities while improving alignment with Indian cultural contexts. Comprehensive evaluation using automated metrics and 10K human assessments confirms high data quality. Downstream evaluations performed by fine-tuning models on various datasets and assessing performance across 13 diverse multilingual datasets and model comparative evaluations, demonstrate that models trained on Updesh consistently obtain significant improvements on NLG tasks and remain competitive on NLU tasks. Improvements are most pronounced for low and medium-resource languages, effectively narrowing performance gaps with high-resource languages. Our findings provide empirical evidence that effective multilingual AI development requires multi-faceted, culturally grounded data curation strategies beyond translation-based approaches.

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Experiments or Outcomes? Probing Scientific Feasibility in Large Language Models

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