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Long Chain-of-Thought (LCoT), achieved by Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR), has proven effective in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, reasoning in current LLMs is primarily generated as plain text, where performing semantic evaluation on such unstructured data creates a computational bottleneck during training. Despite RLVR-based optimization, existing methods still suffer from coarse-grained supervision, reward hacking, high training costs, and poor generalization.
To address these issues, we propose the Graph Reasoning Paradigm (GRP), which realizes structured and symbolic reasoning, implemented via graph-structured representations with step-level cognitive labels. Building upon GRP, we further design Process-Aware Stratified Clipping Group Relative Policy Optimization (PASC-GRPO), which leverages structured evaluation to replace semantic evaluation, achieves process-aware verification through graph-structured outcome rewards, and mitigates reward hacking via stratified clipping advantage estimation. Experiments demonstrate significant improvements across mathematical reasoning and code generation tasks. Data, models, and code will be released later.

ACL 2026

Graph Reasoning Paradigm: Structured and Symbolic Reasoning with Topology-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Large Language Models

We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

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-26 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.

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AAAI 2026

We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

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. 
[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.

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has led to a surge in both model supply and application demands. To facilitate effective matching between them, generic and efficient benchmark generators that can construct high-quality benchmarks are widely needed. However, human annotators are constrained by inefficiency, and current LLM-based benchmark generators lack not only generalizability but also a comprehensive evaluation framework for validation and optimization. To fill this gap, we first establish an automated evaluation framework, structured around four dimensions and ten criteria. Under this framework, we carefully analyze the advantages and weaknesses of directly prompting LLMs as generic benchmark generators. On this basis, we introduce a series of methods to address the identified weaknesses and integrate them as BenchMaker. Experiments across multiple LLMs and tasks confirm that BenchMaker achieves comparable performance to human-annotated benchmarks on most metrics, highlighting its generalizability and validity. More importantly, it delivers highly consistent evaluation results across 21 LLMs (e.g., 0.969 Pearson correlation against MMLU-Pro on language understanding task), while incurring minimal overhead (e.g., $0.005 and 0.38 minutes per sample when using GPT-4o mini as generator).

LLM-Powered Benchmark Factory: Reliable, Generic, and Efficient

Document Visual Question Answering (DocVQA) aims to generate answers by jointly understanding the textual, layout, and visual elements within document images. Although end-to-end vision-based generative methods have reduced dependency on OCR, they still struggle to achieve precise evidence localization when page semantics are complex and highly similar. However, existing research lacks an in-depth theoretical analysis of the question-driven semantic representation space, failing to fundamentally address the distinguishability problem among semantically similar pages. To fill this theoretical gap, we propose and prove that, given a specific question, each page possesses a unique semantic representation, and there exists a bijective mapping between the page and its unique semantics. Based on this theoretical foundation, we introduce the \textbf{F}low-Based Page \textbf{U}nique Semantic \textbf{M}apping \textbf{A}rchitecture (\textbf{FUMA}), which reconstructs evidence localization from similarity-based retrieval into precise selection on unique semantics. FUMA employs fine-grained cross-modal attention to extract discriminative cues and utilizes flow-based reversible transformations with likelihood regularization to learn bijective mappings, ensuring that each page obtains a unique semantic representation. Moreover, a multi-expert collaboration mechanism complementarily models fine-grained multimodal information within each page, achieving robust answer generation. Experimental results demonstrate that FUMA significantly outperforms existing methods in both evidence localization and answer generation.

Flow-Based Page Unique Semantic Mapping Architecture for Document Visual Question Answering

Warning: This paper may contain content that could be disturbing or offensive. Content moderation in online platforms faces persistent challenges due to the evolving complexity of user-generated content and the limitations of traditional rule-based and machine learning approaches. While recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled more sophisticated moderation via direct prompting or fine-tuning, these approaches often exhibit limited generalization, interpretability, and adaptability to unseen or ambiguous cases.

In this work, we propose a novel moderation framework that leverages analogical examples to enhance rule induction and decision reliability. Our approach integrates end-to-end optimization of analogical retrieval, rule generation, and moderation classification, enabling the dynamic adaptation of moderation rules to diverse content scenarios. Through comprehensive experiments, we demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms both rule-injected fine-tuning baselines and multi-stage static RAG pipelines in terms of moderation accuracy and rule quality. Further evaluations—including human assessments and external model generalization tests confirm the superiority of rules generated by our framework in terms of clarity, interpretability, and applicability. These findings highlight the potential of analogical example-driven methods for advancing robust, explainable, and generalizable content moderation in real-world applications.

CʜAIRO: Contextual Hierarchical Analogical Induction and Reasoning Optimization for LLMs

Recent advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have largely been driven by aligning visual encoders with pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs). While effective, the geometric nature of this alignment remains under-explored. Existing methods often assume a symmetric interaction between visual and textual modalities, implying that both spaces adapt to each other. In this paper, we challenge this assumption and propose the "Text Space as Anchor" hypothesis. We argue that the semantic space of LLMs is rigid, anisotropic, and dominant; thus, effective cross-modal alignment may be an asymmetric projection of visual features onto this pre-existing text manifold without distorting it. We identify a potential issue in current parameter-efficient tuning paradigms where task-specific visual adjustments inadvertently disrupt the projector's geometry, leading to "catastrophic forgetting" of the alignment mechanism itself. To address this, we introduce Anchor-Preserving Projection (APP), a novel method that regularizes the projector to maintain the geometric structure of the text embedding space via spectral filtering. Extensive experiments on 8 diverse cross-modal tasks and 3 pure language benchmarks demonstrate that APP preserves the LLM's inherent linguistic capabilities (e.g., MMLU, GSM8K) and reduces object hallucination significantly better than standard fine-tuning methods. We release our code.

The Dominance of Text Space: Unveiling the Asymmetric Nature of Cross-Modal Alignment in Large Language Models

Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with high-stakes medical standards remains a significant challenge, primarily due to the dissonance between coarse-grained preference signals and the complex, multi-dimensional nature of clinical protocols. To bridge this gap, we introduce $\textit{ProMedical}$, a unified alignment framework grounded in fine-grained clinical criteria. We first construct $\textit{ProMedical-Preference-50k}$, a dataset generated via a human-in-the-loop pipeline that augments medical instructions with rigorous, physician-derived rubrics. Leveraging this corpus, we propose the Explicit Criteria Injection paradigm to train a multi-dimensional reward model. Unlike traditional scalar reward models, our approach explicitly disentangles safety constraints from general proficiency, enabling precise guidance during reinforcement learning. To rigorously validate this framework, we establish $\textit{ProMedical-Bench}$, a held-out evaluation suite anchored by double-blind expert adjudication. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that optimizing the $\texttt{Qwen3-8B}$ base model via $\textit{ProMedical-RM}$-guided GRPO yields substantial gains, improving overall accuracy by 22.3\% and safety compliance by 21.7\%, effectively rivaling proprietary frontier models. Furthermore, the aligned policy generalizes robustly to external benchmarks, demonstrating performance comparable to state-of-the-art models on UltraMedical. We publicly release our datasets, reward models, and benchmarks to facilitate reproducible research in safety-aware medical alignment.

ProMedical: Hierarchical Fine-Grained Criteria Modeling for Medical LLM Alignment via Explicit Injection

E-commerce risk management requires aggregating diverse, deeply embedded web data through multi-step, stateful interactions, which traditional scraping methods and most existing Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents cannot handle. These agents are typically limited to single-step tasks and lack the ability to manage dynamic, interactive content critical for effective risk assessment. To address this challenge, we introduce RISK, a novel framework designed to build and deploy GUI agents for this domain. RISK integrates three components: (1) RISK-Data, a dataset of 8,492 single-step and 2,386 multi-step interaction trajectories, collected through a high-fidelity browser framework and a meticulous data curation process; (2) RISK-Bench, a benchmark with 802 single-step and 320 multi-step trajectories across three difficulty levels for standardized evaluation; and (3) RISK-R1, a R1-style reinforcement fine-tuning framework considering four aspects: (i) Output Format Constraint, (ii) Single-step and (iii) Multi-step Level Reward, and (iv) Task Level Reweight. Experiments show that RISK-R1 achieves a 6.8% improvement in offline single-step and an 8.8% improvement in offline multi-step, using only 7.2% of the parameters of the SOTA baseline. Moreover, it attains a top task success rate of 70.5% in online evaluation. RISK provides a scalable, domain-specific solution for automating complex web interactions in e-commerce risk management. The code is available at https://github.com/RenqiChen/RISK-GUI.

RISK: A Framework for GUI Agents in E-commerce Risk Management

Merging multiple Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) experts into a single backbone is a promising approach for efficient multi-task deployment. 
While existing methods strive to alleviate interference via weight interpolation or subspace alignment, they rest upon the implicit assumption that all LoRA matrices contribute constructively to the merged model. 
In this paper, we uncover a critical bottleneck in current merging paradigms: the existence of $\textit{negative modules}$---specific LoRA layers that inherently degrade global performance upon merging. We propose $\textbf{E}$volutionary $\textbf{N}$egative $\textbf{M}$odule $\textbf{P}$runing ($\textbf{ENMP}$), a plug-and-play LoRA pruning method to locate and exclude these detrimental modules prior to merging. By leveraging an evolutionary search strategy, ENMP effectively navigates the discrete, non-differentiable landscape of module selection to identify optimal pruning configurations. 
Extensive evaluations demonstrate that ENMP consistently boosts the performance of existing merging algorithms, achieving a new state-of-the-art across both language and vision domains. Code is available at https://github.com/CaoAnda/ENMP-LoRAMerging.

Evolutionary Negative Module Pruning for Better LoRA Merging

Multi-step reasoning remains challenging for language models with limited capacity. While recent reasoning distillation approaches transfer chain-of-thought supervision from large teacher models, they typically apply uniform supervision across all Transformer components, overlooking the fact that different modules contribute unequally to reasoning. We propose Module-Aware Reasoning Distillation, a parameter-efficient framework that explicitly targets key Transformer components for effective reasoning transfer. Through systematic analysis, we identify the feed-forward network projections and the output projection of self-attention as primary bottlenecks for reasoning. Based on these findings, we introduce lightweight adapter modules at these components while freezing the backbone parameters, enabling focused and efficient distillation. Our approach adopts an offline distillation setting, where a strong teacher model provides reasoning trajectories in advance, and incorporates an adaptive supervision strategy that adjusts the strength of reasoning-related losses according to problem difficulty. Experiments on mathematical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements over strong baselines, and ablation studies confirm the importance of both module-aware placement and adaptive supervision.

MARD: Module-Aware Reasoning Distillation for Language Models with Adaptive Supervision

While Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in various general domains, they exhibit notable gaps in the highly specialized, knowledge-intensive, and legally regulated Chinese tax domain. Consequently, while tax-related benchmarks are gaining attention, many focus on isolated NLP tasks, neglecting real-world practical capabilities. To address this issue, we introduce TaxPraBen, the first dedicated benchmark for Chinese taxation practice. It combines 10 traditional application tasks, along with 3 pioneering real-world scenarios: tax risk prevention, tax inspection analysis, and tax strategy planning, sourced from 14 datasets totaling 7.3K instances. TaxPraBen features a scalable structured evaluation paradigm designed through process of "structured parsing—field alignment extraction—numerical and textual matching", enabling end-to-end tax practice assessment while being extensible to other domains. We evaluate 19 LLMs based on Bloom's taxonomy. The results indicate significant performance disparities: all closed-source large-parameter LLMs excel, and Chinese LLMs like Qwen2.5 generally exceed multilingual LLMs, while the YaYi2 LLM, fine-tuned with some tax data, shows only limited improvement. TaxPraBen\footnote{\url{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/TaxPraBen/}} serves as a vital resource for advancing evaluations of LLMs in practical applications.

TaxPraBen: A Scalable Benchmark for Structured Evaluation of LLMs in Chinese Real-World Tax Practice

Reasoning capabilities in large language models (LLMs) have generally advanced significantly. However, it is still challenging for existing reasoning-based LLMs to perform effective decision-making abilities in multi-agent environments, due to the absence of explicit foresight modeling. To this end, strategic reasoning, the most fundamental capability to anticipate the counterpart's behaviors and foresee its possible future actions, has been introduced to alleviate the above issues. Strategic reasoning is fundamental to effective decision-making in multi-agent environments, yet existing reasoning enhancement methods for LLMs do not explicitly capture its foresight nature. In this work, we introduce **Fo**resight **P**olicy **O**ptimization (**FoPO**) to enhance strategic reasoning in LLMs, which integrates opponent modeling principles into policy optimization, thereby enabling explicit consideration of both self-interest and counterpart influence. Specifically, we construct two curated datasets, namely ***Cooperative RSA*** and ***Competitive Taboo***, equipped with well-designed rules and moderate difficulty to facilitate a systematic investigation of FoPO in a self-play framework. Our experiments demonstrate that FoPO significantly enhances strategic reasoning across LLMs of varying sizes and origins. Moreover, models trained with FoPO exhibit strong generalization to out-of-domain strategic scenarios, substantially outperforming standard LLM reasoning optimization baselines.

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