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Contextual causal reasoning is a critical yet challenging capability for Large Language Models (LLMs). Existing benchmarks, however, often evaluate this skill in fragmented settings, failing to ensure context consistency or cover the full causal hierarchy. To address this, we pioneer METER to systematically benchmark LLMs across all three levels of the causal ladder under a unified context setting. Our extensive evaluation of various LLMs reveals a significant decline in proficiency as tasks ascend the causal hierarchy. To diagnose this degradation, we conduct a deep mechanistic analysis via both error pattern identification and internal information flow tracing. Our analysis reveals two primary failure modes: (1) LLMs are susceptible to distraction by causally irrelevant but factually correct information at lower level of causality; and (2) as tasks ascend the causal hierarchy, faithfulness to the provided context degrades, leading to a reduced performance. We belive our work advances our understanding of the mechanisms behind LLM contextual causal reasoning and establishes a critical foundation for future research. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/SCUNLP/METER.

ACL 2026

METER: Evaluating Multi-Level Contextual Causal Reasoning in Large Language Models

### Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

Message from the General Chair: 
*It is my great pleasure and honor to welcome you to the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025), held in beautiful Vienna, Austria, from July 27 to August 1, 2025. ACL2025continues our field’s 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.* 
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ACL 2025

Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

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.

While GUI agents have shown strong performance under explicit and completion instructions, real-world deployment requires aligning with users’ more complex implicit intents. In this work, we highlight Hierarchical Implicit Intent Alignment for Personalized GUI Agent (**PersonalAlign**), a new agent task that requires agents to leverage long-term user records as persistent context to resolve omitted preferences in vague instructions and anticipate latent routines by user state for proactive assistance. To facilitate this study, we introduce **AndroidIntent**, a benchmark designed to evaluate agents’ ability in resolving vague instructions and providing proactive suggestions through reasoning over long-term user records. We annotated 775 user-specific preferences and 215 routines from 20k long-term records across different users for evaluation. Furthermore, we introduce Hierarchical Intent Memory Agent (**HIM-Agent**), which maintains a continuously updating personal memory and hierarchically organizes user preferences and routines for personalization. Finally, we evaluate a range of GUI agents on AndroidIntent, including GPT-5, Qwen3-VL, and UI-TARS, further results show that HIM-Agent significantly improves both execution and proactive performance by 15.7% and 7.3%.

PersonalAlign: Hierarchical Implicit Intent Alignment for Personalized GUI Agent with Long-Term User-Centric Records

Code translation across multiple programming languages is essential yet challenging due to two vital obstacles: scarcity of parallel data paired with executable test oracles, and optimization imbalance when handling diverse language pairs. 
We propose BootTrans, a bootstrapping method that resolves both obstacles. Its key idea is to leverage the functional invariance and cross-lingual portability of test suites, adapting abundant pivot-language unit tests to serve as universal verification oracles for multilingual reinforcement learning (RL) training. Our method introduces a dual-pool architecture with seed and exploration pools to progressively expand training data via execution-guided experience collection.
Furthermore, we design a language-aware weighting mechanism that dynamically prioritizes harder translation directions based on relative performance across sibling languages, mitigating optimization imbalance. 
Extensive experiments on the HumanEval-X and TransCoder-Test benchmarks demonstrate substantial improvements over baseline LLMs across all translation directions, with ablation studies validating the effectiveness of both bootstrapping and weighting components.

Bootstrapping Code Translation with Weighted Multilanguage Exploration

Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly shape public discourse, yet most evaluations of economic and political bias have focused on high-resource Western languages and contexts. This leaves a blind spots in low-resource, multilingual regions such as Pakistan, where linguistic identity is closely tied to regional, religious, and political ideologies. We present a systematic evaluation of political bias in 13 state-of-the-art LLMs across five Pakistani languages: Urdu, Punjabi, Sindhi, Pashto, and Balochi. Our framework integrates a culturally adapted Political Compass Test (PCT) with multi-level framing analysis, capturing both ideological stance (economic/social axes) and stylistic framing (content, tone, emphasis). The prompts are aligned with 11 socio-political themes specific to the Pakistani context. The results show that while LLMs significantly reflect liberal-left orientations consistent with Western training data, they exhibit more authoritarian framing in regional languages, highlighting language-conditioned ideological modulation. We also identify model-specific bias patterns in all languages. These findings show the need for culturally grounded multilingual bias examining frameworks in NLP. Code and dataset are available.

Framing Political Bias in Multilingual LLMs Across Pakistani Languages

Knowledge Bases (KBs) play a key role in various applications. As two representative KB-related tasks, knowledge base completion (KBC) and knowledge base question answering (KBQA) are closely related and inherently complementary with each other. Thus, it will be beneficial to solve the task of joint KBC and KBQA to make them reinforce each other. However, existing studies usually rely on the small language model (SLM) to enhance them jointly, and the large language model (LLM)'s strong reasoning ability is ignored. In this paper, by combining the strengths of the LLM with the SLM, we propose a novel framework JCQL, which can make these two tasks enhance each other in an iterative manner. To make KBC enhance KBQA, we augment the LLM agent-based KBQA model's reasoning paths by incorporating an SLM-trained KBC model as an action of the agent, alleviating the LLM's hallucination and high computational costs issue in KBQA. To make KBQA enhance KBC, we incrementally fine-tune the KBC model by leveraging KBQA's reasoning paths as its supplementary training data, improving the ability of the SLM in KBC. Extensive experiments over two public benchmark data sets demonstrate that JCQL surpasses all baselines for both KBC and KBQA tasks.

Joint Knowledge Base Completion and Question Answering by Combining Large Language Models and Small Language Models

Infographics are composite visual artifacts that combine data visualizations with textual and illustrative elements to communicate information. While recent text-to-image (T2I) models can generate aesthetically appealing images, their reliability in generating infographics remains unclear. Generated infographics may appear correct at first glance but contain easily overlooked issues, such as distorted data encoding or incorrect textual content. We present IGenBench, the first benchmark for evaluating the reliability of text-to-infographic generation, comprising 600 curated test cases spanning 30 infographic types. We design an automated evaluation framework that decomposes reliability verification into atomic yes/no questions based on a taxonomy of 10 question types. We employ multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to verify each question, yielding question-level accuracy (Q-ACC) and infographic-level accuracy (I-ACC). We comprehensively evaluate 10 state-of-the-art T2I models on IGenBench. Our systematic analysis reveals key insights for future model development: (i) a three-tier performance hierarchy with the top model achieving Q-ACC of 0.90 but I-ACC of only 0.49; (ii) data-related dimensions emerging as universal bottlenecks (e.g., Data Completeness: 0.21); and (iii) the challenge of achieving end-to-end correctness across all models.

IGenBench: Benchmarking the Reliability of Text-to-Infographic Generation

Function calling empowers large language models (LLMs) to interface with external tools, yet existing RL-based approaches suffer from misalignment between reasoning processes and tool-call decisions. We propose R2IF, a reasoning-aware RL framework for interpretable function calling, adopting a composite reward integrating format/correctness constraints, Chain-of-Thought Effectiveness Reward (CER), and Specification-Modification-Value (SMV) reward, optimized via GRPO. Experiments on BFCL/ACEBench show R2IF outperforms baselines by up to 34.62% (Llama3.2-3B on BFCL) with positive Average CoT Effectiveness (0.05 for Llama3.2-3B), enhancing both function-calling accuracy and interpretability for reliable tool-augmented LLM deployment.

R2IF: Aligning Reasoning with Decisions via Composite Rewards for Interpretable LLM Function Calling

The ability to model sparse and underspecified rewards, characteristic of human preferences, is fundamental to scaling Reinforcement Learning (RL). Current preference-based reward modeling largely relies on verifiable rewards, where human-annotated labels define rule-based signals. However, these methods face a fundamental bottleneck we term the Matryoshka Doll Problem: a recursive dependency where each reward verifier requires a meta-verifier, leading to continuous and costly dependence on human annotation. In this work, we propose Dual RM, which couples discriminative and generative reward models (DisRMs and GenRMs) under a non-parametric meta-reward. Rather than verifying the correctness of GenRM’s reasoning, the meta-reward evaluates its practical impact on response quality. Specifically, GenRM identifies multi-dimensional evaluation rubrics and iteratively refines the response, while DisRM quantifies the quality shifts induced by each rubric. Furthermore, we implement rubric-based test-time scaling to improve sample efficiency and preference alignment under both DPO and GRPO. Our experiments demonstrate that Dual RM achieves strong performance across major preference benchmarks. Notably, even when trained exclusively on language modality, it exhibits robust cross-modal transfer on Omni-RewardBench.

DUAL RM: Beyond Rule-based Preference Reward Modeling via Meta-Reward

The widespread deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) has spurred significant progress in the detection of LLM-generated text. However, existing detection methods often rely on statistical features that are insufficient for reliable detection; for example, even though LLM-generated and human-written texts exhibit different probability distributions in surrogate models, they can produce nearly identical entropy values, thereby conflating the two types of text. In this paper, we propose that modulating the decoding temperature and monitoring how the probability distributions respond can better probe the intrinsic discrepancies between two types of text. Building upon this insight, we introduce a new feature termed Temperature Sensitivity (TS) and demonstrate that LLM-generated text tends to exhibit higher TS than human-written text. Finally, we propose NTS, a novel and simple zero-shot detector built upon normalized temperature sensitivity. Extensive experiments across three datasets, multiple domains, and various source models demonstrate the superior effectiveness and robustness of our proposed approach. Code avaliable at: https://github.com/Shixuan-Ma/NTS.

Zero-Shot Detection of LLM-Generated Text using Temperature Sensitivity

The effective detection and governance of Large Language Model (LLM) generated content has become increasingly critical due to the growing risk of misuse. Despite the impressive performance of existing detectors, their reliability and potential in multilingual, real-world scenarios remain largely underexplored.
In this study, we introduce DetectRL-X, a comprehensive multilingual benchmark designed to evaluate advanced detectors across 8 dimensions. The benchmark encompasses 8 languages commonly used in commercial contexts and collects human-written texts from 6 domains highly susceptible to LLM misuse. To better aligned with real-world applications, We create LLM-generated texts using 4 popular commercial LLMs, and include typical AI-assisted writing operations such as polishing, expanding, and condensing to capture authentic usage patterns. Furthermore, we develop a multilingual framework for paraphrasing and perturbation attacks to simulate diverse human modifications and writing noise, enabling stress testing of detectors across languages.
Experimental results on DetectRL-X reveal the strengths and limitations of current state-of-the-art detectors when applied to diverse linguistic resources. We further analyze how domains, generators, attack strategies, text length, and refinement operations influence performance in different languages, underscoring DetectRL-X as an effective benchmark for strengthening multilingual and language-specific detectors.

DetectRL-X: Towards Reliable Multilingual and Real-World LLM-Generated Text Detection

The quadratic complexity and indefinitely growing key-value (KV) cache of standard Transformers pose a major barrier to long-context processing. To overcome this, we introduce the **Co**llaborative **Me**mory **T**ransformer (CoMeT), a novel architecture that enables LLMs to handle arbitrarily long sequences with constant memory usage and linear time complexity. Designed as an efficient, plug-in module, CoMeT can be integrated into pre-trained models with only minimal fine-tuning. It operates on sequential data chunks, using a dual-memory system to manage context: a temporary memory on a FIFO queue for recent events, and a global memory with a gated update rule for long-range dependencies. These memories then act as a dynamic soft prompt for the next chunk. The effectiveness of our approach is remarkable: a model equipped with CoMeT and fine-tuned on 32k contexts can accurately retrieve a passkey from any position within a 1M token sequence. On the SCROLLS benchmark, CoMeT surpasses other efficient methods and achieves performance comparable to a full-attention baseline on summarization tasks. Its practical effectiveness is further validated on real-world agent and user behavior QA tasks, supported by a novel layer-level pipeline parallel training strategy that enables fine-tuning on extremely long contexts. The code is available at: https://github.com/LivingFutureLab/Comet

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PersonalAlign: Hierarchical Implicit Intent Alignment for Personalized GUI Agent with Long-Term User-Centric Records

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On the Reliability of Large Language Models for Causal Discovery

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