United States

Intelligent education systems often collect exam sheets as in-the-wild photos. These photos often suffer from distortions and noise caused by handwriting and occlusions, collectively referred to as Real-World Degraded Exam Images (RDEI). Structure-preserving reconstruction is key to converting RDEI into structured assets for downstream educational applications. Existing Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) often fail under RDEI, leading to disrupted structure and evidence-unsupported hallucinations. To tackle these challenges, we propose MessToClean, a backbone-agnostic, evidence-driven pipeline that treats off-the-shelf MLLMs as interchangeable components. By grounding extraction in pixel-aligned evidence and enforcing post-hoc consistency auditing on recovered structures, MessToClean mitigates unsupported hallucinations and enhances both controllability and structural fidelity in question-level reconstruction. We curate RDEI-Exam from our educational platforms and evaluate across 12 state-of-the-art MLLM backbones. Across these, MessToClean improves stem consistency by 1.01-3.18\%, figure consistency by 0.50-49.16\%, and refusal F1 by 1.06-10.88\% across question types.

ACL 2026

MessToClean: Evidence-Grounded Structure-Preserving Reconstruction for Real-World Degraded Exam Paper Images

### Welcome to 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Welcome to the 2025 meeting of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics! I am proud to help organize the first NAACL conference to carry the new name of our organization, one that emphasizes inclusion for all of the Americas. I am also pleased to welcome you to Albuquerque, New Mexico, a state whose unique blend of cultural influences will make for an excellent backdrop for NAACL 2025, especially with this year’s special theme on NLP in a Multicultural World. 
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NAACL 2025

Welcome to 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

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. 
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Large language models (LLMs) can call tools effectively, yet they remain brittle in multi-turn execution: after a tool-call error, smaller models often fall into repetitive invalid re-invocations instead of interpreting the feedback and recovering. This failure mode persists because current training paradigms do not explicitly teach models how to recover from execution errors. In particular, standard reinforcement learning (RL) collapses rich failure experience into sparse negative rewards, while pre-collected error-correction datasets become mismatched to the policy's evolving failure modes. To bridge this gap, we propose Fission-GRPO, a framework that converts execution errors into on-policy corrective supervision within the RL training loop. Our core mechanism fissions each failed trajectory into a new training instance by augmenting it with diagnostic feedback from a fine-tuned Error Simulator, then resampling multiple recovery rollouts on-policy. This enables the model to learn from the precise errors it makes during exploration, rather than from static, pre-collected error cases. On BFCL v4 Multi-Turn, Fission-GRPO improves the error recovery rate of Qwen3-8B by 5.7% absolute and overall accuracy by 4.0% (from 42.75% to 46.75%), outperforming both RL baselines and specialized tool-use agents. The method further generalizes to TAU-Bench and TAU2-Bench, achieving leading results across most settings with gains up to +17.4%.

Robust Tool Use via Fission-GRPO: Learning to Recover from Execution Errors

Large language models (LLMs) trained on unfiltered corpora inherently risk retaining sensitive information, necessitating selective knowledge unlearning for regulatory compliance and ethical safety. However, existing parameter-modifying methods face fundamental limitations: high computational costs, uncontrollable forgetting boundaries, and strict dependency on model weight access. These constraints render them impractical for closed-source models, yet current non-invasive alternatives remain unsystematic and reliant on empirical experience. To address these challenges, we propose the Controllable Alignment Prompting for Unlearning (CAP) framework, an end-to-end prompt-driven unlearning paradigm. CAP decouples unlearning into a learnable prompt optimization process via reinforcement learning, where a prompt generator collaborates with the LLM to suppress target knowledge while preserving general capabilities selectively. This approach enables reversible knowledge restoration through prompt revocation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CAP achieves precise, controllable unlearning without updating model parameters, establishing a dynamic alignment mechanism that overcomes the transferability limitations of prior methods.

CAP: Controllable Alignment Prompting for Unlearning in LLMs

Proactive dialogue has emerged as a critical and challenging research problem in advancing large language models (LLMs). Existing works predominantly focus on domain-specific or task-oriented scenarios, which leads to fragmented evaluations and limits the comprehensive exploration of models' proactive dialogue abilities. In this work, we propose ProactiveEval, a unified framework for evaluating proactive dialogue capabilities of LLMs. This framework decomposes proactive dialogue into target planning and dialogue guidance, establishing evaluation metrics across various domains. Moreover, it also enables the automatic generation of diverse and challenging evaluation data. Based on the proposed framework, we develop 328 evaluation environments spanning 6 distinct domains. Through experiments with 22 different types of LLMs, we show that DeepSeek-R1 and Claude-3.7-Sonnet exhibit exceptional performance on target planning and dialogue guidance tasks, respectively. Finally, we investigate how reasoning capabilities influence proactive behaviors and discuss their implications for future model development. Our code and data are available at the https://github.com/liutj9/ProactiveEval.

ProactiveEval: A Unified Evaluation Framework for Proactive Dialogue Agents

Existing Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) algorithms, such as GRPO, rely on rigid, uniform, and symmetric trust region mechanisms that are fundamentally misaligned with the complex optimization dynamics of Large Language Models (LLMs). In this paper, we identify three critical challenges in these methods: (1) inefficient gradient utilization caused by the binary cutoff of hard clipping, (2) insensitive probability mass arising from uniform ratio constraints that ignore the token distribution, and (3) asymmetric signal reliability stemming from the disparate credit assignment ambiguity between positive and negative samples. To bridge these gaps, we propose Mass-Adaptive Soft Policy Optimization (MASPO), a unified framework designed to harmonize these three dimensions. MASPO integrates a differentiable soft Gaussian gating to maximize gradient utility, a mass-adaptive limiter to balance exploration across the probability spectrum, and an asymmetric risk controller to align update magnitudes with signal confidence. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that MASPO serves as a robust, all-in-one RLVR solution, significantly outperforming baselines. Our code is available at: https://github.com/FlyTune/MASPO-RL.

MASPO: Unifying Gradient Utilization, Probability Mass, and Signal Reliability for Robust and Sample-Efficient LLM Reasoning

Existing \textit{In-context Learning (ICL)} typically assumes the retrieval dataset contains demonstrations for all output label spaces. However, in real-world scenarios, delays in dataset updates or incomplete data annotation may result in the retrieval dataset containing labeled demonstrations for only a subset of the output space. We refer to this phenomenon as an \textit{incomplete retrieval dataset} and define the in-context learning under this condition as \textit{Incomplete In-context Learning (IICL)}. To address IICL, we propose \textit{Iterative Judgments and Integrated Prediction (IJIP)}, a framework with train-free and train-based variants. For classification, the iterative judgments stage of IJIP reformulates an (m)-class problem into (m) binary tasks, converting IICL into standard ICL. The integrated prediction stage of IJIP then refines results using both the input and initial predictions. We further extend IJIP to text regression and generation, and introduce lightweight variants that reduce computation and token costs. Across six LLMs, seven tasks, and eight datasets, IJIP achieves state-of-the-art results under two incompleteness settings and even outperforms standard ICL with complete labels. IJIP also supports a semi-supervised variant and can serve as a plug-and-play enhancement for existing ICL and zero-shot methods.

Incomplete In-context Learning

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in code generation across various domains. However, their ability to replicate complex, multi-panel visualizations from real-world data remains largely unassessed. To address this gap, we introduce \textbf{\texttt{RealChart2Code}}, a new large-scale benchmark with over 2,800 instances grounded in authentic datasets and featuring tasks with clear analytical intent. Crucially, it is the first benchmark to systematically evaluate chart generation from large-scale raw data and assess iterative code refinement in a multi-turn conversational setting. Our comprehensive evaluation of 14 leading VLMs on \texttt{RealChart2Code} reveals significant performance degradation compared to simpler benchmarks, highlighting their struggles with complex plot structures and authentic data. Our analysis uncovers a substantial performance gap between proprietary and open-weight models and confirms that even state-of-the-art VLMs often fail to accurately replicate intricate, multi-panel charts. These findings provide valuable insights into the current limitations of VLMs and guide future research directions.

RealChart2Code: Bridging the Gap in Real-World Chart-to-Code Generation via Multi-Task Evaluation

Math word problems (MWPs) are critical K-12 educational tools, and customizing them to students' interests and ability levels can enhance learning. However, teachers struggle to find time to customize MWPs for students given large class sizes and increasing burnout. We propose that LLMs can support math education by generating MWPs customized to student interests and math education standards. We use a joint human expert-LLM judge approach to evaluate over 11,000 MWPs generated by open and closed LLMs and develop the first teacher-annotated dataset for standards-aligned educational MWP generation. We show the value of our data by using it to train a 12B open model that matches the performance of larger and more capable open models. We also use our teacher-annotated data to train a text classifier that enables a 30B open LLM to outperform existing closed baselines without any training. Next, we show our models' MWPs are more similar to human-written MWPs than those from existing models. We conclude by conducting the first study of customized LLM-generated MWPs with grade school students, finding they perform similarly on our models' MWPs relative to human-written MWPs but consistently prefer our customized MWPs.

EDUMATH: Generating Standards-aligned Educational Math Word Problems

Although Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated substantial proficiency in reasoning, current approaches focus disproportionately on scaling correct training samples, underexploring the value of incorrect reasoning trajectories. Motivated by how humans learn from mistakes, we propose ReActR (Reasoning through Error-Activated Reflection), a framework that enhances reasoning by learning reflective behaviors from erroneous trajectories. Specifically, ReActR comprises data construction and training. First, we synthesize multi-turn erroneous reasoning dataset spanning diverse error types and difficult levels via self-generation and targeted error generation. Second, we enhance the model's capabilities through Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) on synthesized data and then apply Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) with multiple reward signals to further refine reasoning performance. Extensive experiments across five benchmarks and three LLMs demonstrate that ReActR effectively enhances reasoning performance. Notably, on Llama-3-8B, ReActR achieves an average improvement of 3.5% across the five datasets.

ReActR: Reasoning through Error-Activated Reflection for LLM Post-Training

The linear memory growth of the KV cache poses a significant bottleneck for LLM inference in long-context tasks. Existing static compression methods often fail to preserve globally important information. Although recent dynamic retrieval approaches attempt to address this issue, they typically suffer from coarse-grained caching strategies and incur high I/O overhead. To overcome these limitations, we propose HeteroCache, a training-free dynamic compression framework. Our method is built on two key insights: attention heads exhibit diverse temporal heterogeneity, and there is significant spatial redundancy among heads within the same layer.
Guided by these insights, HeteroCache categorizes heads based on stability and similarity, applying a fine-grained weighting strategy that allocates larger cache budgets to heads with rapidly shifting attention to capture context changes.
Furthermore, it features a hierarchical storage mechanism where representative heads monitor attention drift to trigger asynchronous, on-demand context retrieval, thereby hiding I/O latency.
Experiments demonstrate that HeteroCache achieves state-of-the-art performance on long-context benchmarks and accelerates decoding by up to 3× compared to the original model with a 224K context. Our code is available at https://github.com/ponytaill/HeteroCache.

HeteroCache: A Dynamic Retrieval Approach to Heterogeneous KV Cache Compression for Long-Context LLM Inference

LLM-based agents depend on effective tool-use policies to solve complex tasks, yet optimizing these policies remains challenging due
to delayed supervision and the difficulty of
credit assignment in long-horizon trajectories.
Existing optimization approaches tend to be
either monolithic, which are prone to entangling behaviors, or single-aspect, which ignore
cross-module error propagation. To address
these limitations, we propose EVOTOOL, a self-
evolving framework that optimizes a modular
tool-use policy via a gradient-free evolutionary paradigm. EVOTOOL decomposes agent’s
tool-use policy into four modules, including
Planner, Selector, Caller, and Synthesizer, and
iteratively improves them through three mechanisms. Trajectory-Grounded Blame Attribution uses diagnostic traces to localize failures
to a specific module. Feedback-Guided Targeted Mutation then edits only that module
via natural-language critique. Diversity-Aware
Population Selection preserves complementary
candidates to ensure solution diversity. Across
four diverse benchmarks, EVOTOOL outperforms strong baselines by over 5 points on both
GPT-4.1 and Qwen3-8B, while achieving superior efficiency and transferability.

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