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Large language models (LLMs) exhibit complementary strengths arising from differences in pretraining data, model architectures, and decoding behaviors. Inference-time ensembling provides a practical way to combine these capabilities without retraining. However, existing ensemble approaches suffer from fundamental limitations. Most rely on fixed fusion granularity, which lacks the flexibility required for mid-generation adaptation and fails to adapt to different generation characteristics across tasks. To address these challenges, we propose AdaFuse, an adaptive ensemble decoding framework that dynamically selects semantically appropriate fusion units during generation. Rather than committing to a fixed granularity, AdaFuse adjusts fusion behavior on the fly based on the decoding context, with words serving as basic building blocks for alignment. To be specific, we introduce an uncertainty-based criterion to decide whether to apply ensembling at each decoding step. Under confident decoding states, the model continues generation directly. In less certain states, AdaFuse invokes a diversity-aware scaling strategy to explore alternative candidate continuations and inform ensemble decisions. This design establishes a synergistic interaction between adaptive ensembling and test-time scaling, where ensemble decisions guide targeted exploration, and the resulting diversity in turn strengthens ensemble quality. Experiments on open-domain QA, arithmetic reasoning, and machine translation demonstrate that AdaFuse consistently outperforms strong ensemble baselines, achieving an average relative improvement of 6.88%.

ACL 2026

AdaFuse: Adaptive Ensemble Decoding for Large Language Models

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-23 is the Thirty-Seventh AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The theme of this conference is to create collaborative bridges within and beyond AI. Like previous AAAI conferences, AAAI-23 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and two new activities: a Bridge Program and a Lab Program. Many of these activities are tailored to the theme of bridges and all are selected according to the highest standards, with additional programs for students and young researchers. 
AAAI is providing you with a conference planner, which you can use to help organize your itinerary of activities. This includes talks to attend in person, talks to attend remotely, breaks with colleagues and your site seeing activities. To access this conference planner, please go to [https://aaai-2023.takemobi.io](https://aaai-2023.takemobi.io).

In order to access this site, you need to register. If you haven't already, please register [here](https://aaai.org/Conferences/AAAI-23/registration/).


AAAI 2023

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.

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.

Deep research frameworks have shown promising capabilities in synthesizing comprehensive reports from web sources. While deep research possesses significant potential to address complex issues through planning and research cycles, existing frameworks are deficient in sufficient evaluation procedures and stage-specific protections. They typically treat evaluation as exact match accuracy of question-answering, but overlook crucial aspects of report quality such as credibility, coherence, breadth, depth, and safety. This oversight may result in hazardous or malicious sources being integrated into the final report. To address this, we introduce DeepResearchGuard, a framework featuring four-stage safeguards with open-domain evaluation, and DRSafeBench, a novel stage-wise safety benchmark. Evaluating across GPT-4o, o4-mini, Gemini-2.5-flash, DeepSeek-v3, and GPT-5, DeepResearchGuard improves defense success rates by an absolute 16.53% while reducing over-refusal rates to approximately 6%. Through extensive experiments, we show that DeepResearchGuard enables comprehensive open-domain evaluation and stage-aware defenses that effectively block harmful content propagation, while systematically improving report quality without excessive over-refusal rates.

Deep Research with Open-Domain Evaluation and Multi-Stage Guardrails for Safety

Recent image generation and editing models demonstrate robust adherence to instructions and high visual quality on academic benchmarks.
However, their performance on paid, real-world design projects remains uncertain. 
We introduce \textbf{ServImage}, a benchmark that explicitly correlates model outputs with economic value in commercial design projects. 
ServImage consists of 
(i) \textbf{\textit{ServImageBench}}: a dataset of 1.07k paid commercial design tasks and 2.05k designer deliverables totaling over \$295k, covering portrait, product, and digital content, along with 33k candidate images and 33k human annotations.
(ii) \textbf{\textit{ServImageScore}}: an integrated scoring system that combines three quality dimensions: baseline requirements fulfilment, visual execution quality, and commercial necessity satisfaction. These three dimensions are designed to characterize the factors that drive human payment decisions and indicate whether an image is commercially acceptable.
(iii) \textbf{\textit{ServImageModel}}: under this scoring system, we propose a payment prediction model trained on the human-annotated candidate images, achieving 82.00\% accuracy in predicting human payment decisions and producing calibrated payment probabilities.
ServImage provides a comprehensive foundation for assessing the commercial viability of image generation models and offers a scalable resource for future research on economically grounded vision systems
\faGithub~\href{https://github.com/FengxianJi/ServImage}{Github.}

 ServImage: An Image Generation and Editing Benchmark from Real-world Commercial Imaging Services

Large Language Models (LLMs) have increasingly enhanced or replaced traditional Non-Player Characters (NPCs) in video games. However, these LLM-based NPCs inherit underlying social biases (e.g., race or class), posing fairness risks during in-game interactions. To address the limited exploration of this issue, we introduce FairGamer, the first benchmark to evaluate social biases across three interaction patterns: transaction, cooperation, and competition. FairGamer assesses four bias types, including class, race, age, and nationality, across 12 distinct evaluation tasks using a novel metric, FairMCV. Our evaluation of seven frontier LLMs reveals that: (1) models exhibit biased decision-making, with Grok-4-Fast demonstrating the highest bias (average FairMCV = 76.9%); and (2) larger LLMs display more severe social biases, suggesting that increased model capacity inadvertently amplifies these biases. We release FairGamer at https://github.com/BingkangShi/FairGamer to facilitate future research on NPC fairness.

FAIRGAMER: Evaluating Social Biases in LLM-Based Video Game NPCs

Large language models (LLMs) are introducing a paradigm shift in molecular discovery by enabling text-guided interaction with chemical spaces through natural language and symbolic notations, with emerging extensions to incorporate multi-modal inputs. To advance this emerging field, this survey provides an up-to-date and forward-looking review of the emerging use of LLMs for two central tasks: molecule generation and molecule optimization. We organize our survey around four fundamental challenges that have emerged as critical evaluation dimensions in recent studies: ensuring validity, enhancing synthesizability, achieving precise property control, and maximizing diversity. Based on this, we systematically analyze how current LLM learning paradigms are applied to tackle each challenge, revealing the distinct capabilities and inherent limitations of each approach. In addition, we include the commonly used datasets and evaluation protocols aligned with these challenges. We conclude by discussing future directions, positioning this survey as a resource for researchers working at the intersection of LLMs and molecular science. A continuously updated reading list is available at \url{https://github.com/REAL-Lab-NU/Awesome-LLM-Centric-Molecular-Discovery}.

A Survey of Large Language Models for Text-Guided Molecular Discovery: From Molecule Generation to Optimization

This paper introduces Late Code Chunking (LC$^2$), a chunking strategy designed to improve the semantic understanding of code segments for Large Language Models (LLMs). Repository-level code completion requires predicting the completion of unfinished code by leveraging cross-file context spread across a repository. However, when retrieved fragments have missing semantics—the loss of structural or behavioral information during chunking—LLMs struggle to interpret the target code. To address this, LC$^2$ refines retrieved chunks by constructing a dual context: a "Code Retrieval Context" optimized for similarity-based search, and a "Code Comprehension Context" that serves as a late enrichment step through context expansion and augmentation. This dual-context design reduces information loss due to chunking and enhances the ability of LLMs to utilize retrieved code. Additionally, we introduce an Asymmetric Query-Chunk Sizing strategy to further optimize retrieval quality by minimizing query noise. Our experiments demonstrate that LC$^2$ provides robust performance gains, achieving a statistically significant 19.7\% improvement in Exact Match accuracy on the CrossCodeEval benchmark compared to the best existing chunking method.

Late Code Chunking: A Code Chunking Strategy for Repository-Level Code Completion

Search-engine date filters are widely used to enforce pre-cutoff retrieval in retrospective evaluations of search-augmented forecasters. We show this approach is unreliable across two major search engines: auditing Google Search's before: filter and DuckDuckGo's date-range filter, we find that at least one retrieved page contains major post-cutoff leakage for 71% of questions on Google and 81% on DuckDuckGo, and the answer is directly revealed for 41% and 55%, respectively. Using gpt-oss-120b to forecast with these leaky documents, we demonstrate inflated prediction accuracy (Brier score 0.10 vs. 0.24 with leak-free documents). We characterize recurring leakage mechanisms, including updated articles, related-content modules, unreliable metadata, and absence-based signals, and argue that date-restricted search on these engines is insufficient for credible retrospective evaluation. We recommend stronger retrieval safeguards or evaluation on frozen, time-stamped web snapshots.

 Temporal Leakage in Search-Engine Date-Filtered Web Retrieval: A Retrospective Forecasting Case Study

The advent of multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) has greatly advanced research on video fake news detection (VFND) tasks. Existing benchmarks typically focus on the detection accuracy, while failing to provide fine-grained assessments for the entire detection process. To address these limitations, we introduce POVFNDB (Process-oriented Video Fake News Detection Benchmark), a process-oriented benchmark comprising 10 tasks designed to systematically evaluate MLLMs' perception, understanding, and reasoning capabilities in VFND. This benchmark contains 36,240 human-annotated question-answer (QA) in structured or open-ended formats, spanning 15 distinct evaluation dimensions that characterize different aspects of the video fake news detection process.Using POVFNDB, we conduct comprehensive evaluations on both proprietary and open-source MLLMs. Moreover, We fine-tune Qwen2.5VL-7B-Instruct on a reasoning dataset generated by our proposed POVFND-CoT, a chain-of-thought method that utilizes rationales from evaluation results and rationale validation. The resulting model achieves sota performance on VFND.

Perception, Understanding and Reasoning: A Multimodal Benchmark for Video Fake News Detection

When users submit queries to Large Language Models (LLMs), their prompts can often contain sensitive data, forcing a difficult choice: Send the query to a powerful proprietary LLM providers to achieving state-of-the-art performance and risk data exposure, or relying on smaller, local models guarantees data privacy but often results in a degradation of task performance. Prior approaches have relied on static pipelines that use LLM rewriting, which shatters linguistic coherence and indiscriminately removes privacy-sensitive information, including task-critical content. We reformulate this challenge (Privacy-Conscious Delegation) as a sequential decision-making problem and introduce a novel reinforcement learning (RL) framework called Privacy-R1 to solve it. Our framework trains an agent to dynamically route text chunks, learning a policy that optimally balances the trade-off between privacy leakage and task performance. It implicitly distinguishes between replaceable Personally Identifiable Information (PII) (which it shields locally) and task-critical PII (which it strategically sends to the remote model for maximal utility). To validate our approach in complex scenarios, we also introduce a new medical dataset with high PII density. Our framework achieves a new state-of-the-art on the privacy-utility frontier, demonstrating the necessity of learned, adaptive policies for deploying LLMs in sensitive environments. Dataset can be found at: https://github.com/zackhuiiiii/Privacy-R1.

 Privacy-R1: Privacy-Aware Multi-LLM Agent Collaboration via Reinforcement Learning

Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) is a pivotal and complex task in multimodal understanding. Current CIR benchmarks typically feature limited query categories and fail to capture the diverse requirements of real-world scenarios. To bridge this evaluation gap, we leverage image editing to achieve precise control over modification types and content, enabling a pipeline for synthesizing queries across a broad spectrum of categories. Using this pipeline, we construct EDIR, a novel fine-grained CIR benchmark. EDIR encompasses 5,000 high-quality queries structured across five main categories and fifteen subcategories. Our comprehensive evaluation of 13 multimodal embedding models reveals a significant capability gap; even state-of-the-art models (e.g., RzenEmbed and GME) struggle to perform consistently across all subcategories, highlighting the rigorous nature of our benchmark. Through comparative analysis, we further uncover inherent limitations in existing benchmarks, such as modality biases and insufficient categorical coverage. Furthermore, an in-domain training experiment demonstrates the feasibility of our benchmark. This experiment clarifies the task challenges by distinguishing between categories that are solvable with targeted data and those that expose intrinsic limitations of current model architectures.

Rethinking Composed Image Retrieval Evaluation: A Fine-Grained Benchmark from Image Editing

Large language models (LLMs) are widely used in knowledge-intensive applications but often generate factually incorrect responses. A promising approach to rectify these flaws is correcting LLMs using feedback. Therefore, in this paper, we introduce FactCorrector, a new post-hoc correction method that adapts across domains without retraining and leverages structured feedback about the factuality of the original response to generate a correction. To support rigorous evaluations of factuality correction methods, we also develop the VELI5 benchmark, a novel dataset containing systematically injected factual errors and ground-truth corrections. Experiments on VELI5 and several popular long-form factuality datasets show that the FactCorrector approach significantly improves factual precision while preserving relevance, outperforming strong baselines. We release our code at https://ibm.biz/factcorrector.

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