United States

Task oriented dialog systems often rely on static exploration strategies that do not adapt to dynamic dialog contexts, leading to inefficient exploration and suboptimal performance. We propose DyBBT, a novel dialog policy learning framework that formalizes the exploration challenge through a structured cognitive state space $\mathcal{C}$ that captures dialog progression, user uncertainty, and slot dependency. DyBBT proposes a bandit-inspired meta-controller that dynamically switches between a fast intuitive inference (System 1) and a slow deliberative reasoner (System 2) based on real-time cognitive states and visitation counts. Extensive experiments on single- and multi-domain benchmarks show that DyBBT achieves SOTA performance in success rate, efficiency, and generalization, with human evaluations confirming that its decisions are well-aligned with expert judgment.

ACL 2026

DyBBT: Dynamic Balance via Bandit-inspired Targeting for Dialog Policy with Cognitive Dual Systems

The purpose of the AAAI conference is to promote research in artificial intelligence (AI) and scientific exchange among AI researchers, practitioners, scientists, and engineers in affiliated disciplines. 

AAAI 2022

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. <br>
[Full Message from General Chair Philipp Koehn](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QiJFOmMjvDgsDo3i1XzlQnImxe3RU_Cy/view?usp=sharing) <br><br><br>
<html><button style="display: inline-flex; align-items: center; justify-content: center; white-space: nowrap; border-radius: 9999px; font-weight: bold; background: #7c3aed; color: white; font-family: 'Space Grotesk', sans-serif; height: 40px; font-size: 16px; padding: 0 20px; border: none; cursor: pointer" onclick="window.open('https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QiJFOmMjvDgsDo3i1XzlQnImxe3RU_Cy/view?usp=sharing')">Conference Handbook</button></html>
<br><br><br><br>

To access this event page, you need to log in with the **email address you registered with**. <br>Access credentials will be sent to your email from Underline -  subject line "Welcome to ACL 2026". Please be sure to check your spam email folder if you do not see an email confirmation right away.

To access this event page, you are required to register.
Please complete your registration to continue.

We recommend reading [**the registration information**](https://2026.aclweb.org/registration/) first.

**Online Registration Form**: https://acl.swoogo.com/acl2026

Registration Required

The 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026) will take place in San Diego, California, from July 2 - 7, 2026.

High-quality scientific data is critical for advancing LLMs, yet academic literature remains largely underutilized. This work addresses the fundamental question: How can we systematically unlock scientific data's value for pre-training? First, we construct a large-scale raw scientific corpus but identify a critical Learnability Gap, revealing that direct pre-training yields negligible gains. To bridge this, we develop a multi-stage pipeline featuring content cleaning and pedagogical augmentation, resulting in SciPedia, a 900B-token corpus. Finally, we establish a controlled verification framework: we develop SciPedia-Eval benchmark and conduct 600B tokens of continued pre-training (CPT) starting from transparent base models (3B/7B) trained from scratch. Compared to a CPT baseline trained with general-purpose data, our approach with SciPedia data boosts average performance by +2.12 (3B) and +2.95 (7B), reaching +5.60 and +8.40 on in-domain tasks. This setup further allows us to derive empirical guidelines for data composition and model configurations.

SciPedia: Unlocking the Value of Scientific Data for Pre-training

Recent advances in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved impressive progress in multimodal mathematical reasoning. Yet, how
much visual information truly contributes to reasoning remains unclear. Existing benchmarks report strong overall performance but seldom isolate the role of the image modality, leaving open whether VLMs genuinely leverage visual understanding or merely depend on linguistic priors. To address this, we present MathSight, a university-level multimodal mathematical reasoning benchmark designed to disentangle and quantify the effect of visual input. Each problem includes multiple visual variants—original, hand-drawn, photocaptured—and a text-only condition for controlled comparison. Experiments on state-of-the-art VLMs reveal a consistent trend: the contribution of visual information diminishes with increasing problem difficulty. Remarkably, Qwen3-VL without any image input surpasses both its multimodal variants and GPT-5, underscoring the need for benchmarks like MathSight to advance genuine vision-grounded reasoning in future models. The project page is available at https://cnu-bot-group.github.io/MathSight/.

MathSight: A Benchmark Exploring Have Vision-Language Models Really Seen in University-Level Mathematical Reasoning?

Evaluating the alignment between textual prompts and generated images is critical for ensuring the reliability and usability of text-to-image (T2I) models. However, most existing evaluation methods rely on coarse-grained metrics or static Question Answering (QA) pipelines, which lack fine-grained interpretability and struggle to reflect human preferences. To address this, we propose $\textbf{REVEALER}$, a reinforcement-guided visual reasoning framework for element-level text-to-image alignment evaluation. 
Adopting a structured $''grounding–reasoning–conclusion''$ paradigm, our method enables Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to explicitly localize semantic elements and derive interpretable alignment judgments. We optimize the model via Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) using a multi-dimensional reward function that targets format compliance, localization precision, and alignment accuracy.
Extensive experiments confirm that REVEALER achieves state-of-the-art results across four benchmarks. Notably, on EvalMuse-40K, it surpasses the strong proprietary Gemini 3 Pro and Training-based baselines with absolute accuracy gains of $\textbf{+4.2\%}$ and $\textbf{+13.3\%}$, respectively. 
Ablation studies further demonstrate the efficacy of our method, contributing a cumulative $\textbf{19.6\%}$ improvement over the base model.

REVEALER: Reinforcement-Guided Visual Reasoning for Element-Level Text-Image Alignment Evaluation

The UniDive 2025 Morphosyntactic Parsing (MSP) shared task introduces a representation unifying dependency structure, morphological features, and unrealized arguments. Unlike Universal Dependencies, MSP encodes abstract nodes (e.g., dropped subjects, implicit pronouns) as labels projected onto content words, which standard UD parsers cannot model. We present a multilingual, typology-aware joint system integrating word-type prediction, content-only parsing, morphological tagging, and an abstract-node component within a single architecture. The model combines the baseline joint framework with typology-conditioned adapters and progressive weighting for abstract supervision. On the MSP test set, our model outperforms the leading submission by 3.23 percentage points in MSLAS, 3.35 in LAS, and 1.78 in FEATS macro F1, demonstrating the effectiveness of typology-sensitive multi-task learning in MSP.

Typology-Aware Multilingual Morphosyntactic Parsing with Joint Abstract Node Modeling

The quality of pre-training data critically impacts the capabilities of large language models. Existing pipelines rely on expert-crafted heuristic rules, which primarily operate at the sample level and are based on coarse statistical indicators, thus lacking content-aware, fine-grained noise detection. While recent generative approaches, e.g., ProX-C, enable token-level refinement, their reliance on synthesizing Python code incurs prohibitive computational cost at scale and can introduce hallucinations into the refined data. To overcome these limitations, we propose Selecting over Tokens (SelecT), a novel framework that reframes data refinement as a highly efficient token classification task. SelecT classifies each token as either informative or noisy and subsequently removes the latter. This design achieves fine-grained data optimization while avoiding the inefficiency of generation, ensuring scalability. When evaluated on diverse downstream benchmarks, the model trained on SelecT-refined corpora, on average, outperforms the one trained on raw data by over 2\% and exceeds the best heuristic baselines by more than 1\% while preserving 17\% more tokens than the latter. Furthermore, SelecT achieves higher average performance than the generative ProX-C across all experimental settings, and is 2.5x faster at inference, even with twice the parameters. Our results establish SelecT as an effective, efficient, and scalable solution for pre-training data optimization.

SELECting over Tokens: Curating Pre-training Data at Scale via Token Classification

Address intelligence in e-commerce demands accurate geocoding and proactive defect detection under strict sub-$50$~ms latency constraints. These tasks are inherently coupled: precise spatial grounding provides a strong prior for defect propensity, yet prior approaches optimize them independently. While generative LLMs offer rich semantic representations, they lack spatial inductive bias and fail to meet real-time serving requirements. We introduce GeoGround, a multi-task learning framework that jointly models coordinate grounding and address defect detection. The model combines a hierarchical spatial grounding objective with Focal Loss for defect classification, using uncertainty-based task weighting to balance optimization under severe class imbalance. To strengthen supervision, we curate a large-scale noisy address dataset using LLM-assisted data construction, augmenting the training corpus with signals that are costly to obtain manually. GeoGround achieves 5.86$\times$ gains in address defect detection precision and up to 4.86$\times$ improvements in location prediction accuracy over strong encoder baselines, while remaining 75$\times$ more efficient than decoder LLMs such as Qwen2-1.5B. A two-week online A/B test in a large-scale delivery pipeline confirms real-world impact, yielding a 50 bps uplift in defect detection, a 40 bps gain in location prediction, and an estimated operational savings of \$3.09M annually.

GeoGround: Uncertainty-Weighted Multi-Task Learning for Geo-Alignment and Address Defect Detection

Short-video platforms now present tappable search entries beneath the video player, making it effortless for users to shift from passively watching to actively searching for information. Prior work on bottom-bar query generation conditions on titles and OCR to generate a single query per forward pass, constrains decoding with a trie, and evaluates against a single reference using edit-distance–style supervision—making it difficult to cover the diverse intents a video can trigger and to credit semantically equivalent query variants. Motivated by these limitations, we propose four complementary improvements. First, we reformulate the task as one-shot list generation, producing multiple distinct queries per video, and build multi-query ground truth from exposure and CTR logs. Second, we redesign offline evaluation with $\operatorname{CTR\text{-}HungF1}$, a CTR-weighted set-matching metric via optimal assignment over token-level F1 score. Third, we enrich context with a video-to-video-to-query (V2V2Q) RAG pipeline to provide behavior-grounded background knowledge. Finally, we apply thinking-free RLVR with deterministic format checks and $\operatorname{CTR\text{-}HungF1}$ rewards to train a compact LLM without reward models or CoT distillation. The resulting system yields strong offline and online improvements, and has been deployed on Kuaishou to serve hundreds of millions of users daily.

From Short Video to Clickable Search: RLVR-Enabled Listwise Query Suggestion with Retrieval-Augmented Context

With the advancement of vision-language models, web automation has made significant progress. However, deploying autonomous agents in real-world settings remains challenging, primarily due to site heterogeneity, where generalist models lack domain-specific priors for diverse interfaces, and long-horizon instability, characterized by the accumulation of decision drift over extended interactions. To address these challenges, we introduce ColorBrowserAgent (Complex Long-Horizon Browser Agent), a knowledge-evolving agent for robust web automation. Our approach addresses these challenges through two synergistic mechanisms: human-in-the-loop knowledge adaptation that transforms sparse human feedback into reusable domain knowledge, and knowledge-aligned progressive summarization that stabilizes long interactions through memory compression. Extensive experiments on WebArena, WebChoreArena and industrial deployment show that ColorBrowserAgent consistently outperforms strong baselines. It achieves a state-of-the-art success rate of 71.2% on WebArena and maintains 47.4% performance under zero-shot transfer setting on WebChoreArena. In commercial deployment, it improves user satisfaction by 19.3% relatively, verifying its robustness in real-world scenarios.

ColorBrowserAgent: Complex Long-Horizon Browser Agent with Adaptive Knowledge Evolution

As LLMs scale, low-bit floating-point formats like MXFP and NVFP4 offer new opportunities for precision and efficiency. In this work, we evaluate HiFloat (HiF8 and HiF4), a family of formats tailored for Ascend NPUs. Through rigorous comparison across weight-activation and KV-cache tasks, we provide three key insights: (1) INT8 suits narrow-range data, while floating-point formats excel with high-variance data; (2) in 4-bit regimes, HiF4’s hierarchical scaling prevents the accuracy collapse seen in integer formats; and (3) HiFloat is fully compatible with state-of-the-art post-training quantization frameworks. Overall, HiFloat provides a solution for high-efficiency LLM inference on NPUs.

Unleashing Low-Bit Inference on Ascend NPUs: A Comprehensive Evaluation of HiFloat Formats

Credit risk models suffer from rapid performance decay due to distribution shifts, requiring frequent updates to meet strict operational guardrails. However, manual refreshing takes weeks of trial-and-error across upstream data engineering and downstream training. We present ACRM, a deployed multi-agent framework that automates the end-to-end credit modeling workflow by treating it as a learnable trajectory of agent interactions. Unlike AutoML, which optimizes hyperparameters on fixed datasets, ACRM's action space extends to upstream data semantics---cohort selection, observation windowing, feature screening---where the majority of performance recovery occurs. A central Orchestrator coordinates specialist agents through a three-stream decision stack: rule-based safety guardrails, retrieval-augmented grounding from historical workflows, and preference alignment via DPO on expert-labeled trajectories. Deployed at a major fintech institution for three months across six business scenarios, ACRM reduced the average model refresh cycle from weeks to 1.1 days and iteration rounds by 65%, while maintaining superior stability metrics.

Downloads

Next from ACL 2026

SciPedia: Unlocking the Value of Scientific Data for Pre-training

Similar lecture

Efficient Dialog Policy Learning by Reasoning with Contextual Knowledge

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

COMPANY

RESOURCES

.css-70qvj9{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;}Downloads

Next from ACL 2026

SciPedia: Unlocking the Value of Scientific Data for Pre-training

Similar lecture

Efficient Dialog Policy Learning by Reasoning with Contextual Knowledge

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

COMPANY

RESOURCES

Downloads