United States

Unsupervised representation learning using masked language modeling on the language of life has transformed protein research, enabling the analysis of a protein universe that is expanding at an exponential pace. However, most current models rely solely on sequence data, overlooking decades of expert-curated biological knowledge stored in natural language. While recent multimodal and knowledge-graph-based approaches attempt to bridge this gap, they often rely on shallow functional labels that lack the contextual depth of full textual narratives. We present Protein-STORY, a general pipeline that synthesizes protein embeddings from diverse, multi-source text descriptions. At the core of our approach is a novel network architecture designed for the semantic compression of multi document embeddings, which integrates high-fidelity functional and structural insights into a unified representation. Our experiments demonstrate that Protein-STORY produces biologically meaningful embeddings ($r \approx 0.75$) that outperform existing models on diverse downstream tasks (+2 pts F1 in function prediction). Furthermore, by projecting the story of a protein into a natural language semantic space, our model enables effective zero-shot text-prompted protein search.

ACL 2026

Protein-STORY: Semantic Text-Oriented Representation Yields biologically meaningful Protein embeddings

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The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. More information will be announced soon.

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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 evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) is shifting the focus from single, verifiable tasks toward complex, open-ended real-world scenarios, imposing significant challenges on the post-training phase. In these settings, the scale and complexity of reward systems have grown significantly, transitioning toward multi-objective formulations that encompass a comprehensive spectrum of model capabilities and application contexts. However, traditional methods typically rely on fixed reward weights, ignoring non-stationary learning dynamics and struggling with data heterogeneity across dimensions. To address these issues, we propose SPARD, a framework that establishes an automated, self-paced curriculum by perceiving learning progress to dynamically adjust multi-objective reward weights and data importance, thereby synchronizing learning intent with data utility for optimal performance. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that SPARD significantly enhances model capabilities across all domains. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/USTC-StarTeam/SPARD.

SPARD: Self-Paced Curriculum for RL Alignment via Integrating Reward Dynamics and Data Utility

The increasing reliance on natural language generation (NLG) models, particularly large language models, has raised concerns about the reliability and accuracy of their outputs. A key challenge is hallucination, where models produce plausible but incorrect information. As a result, hallucination detection has become a critical task. In this work, we introduce a comprehensive hallucination taxonomy with 11 categories across various NLG tasks and propose the HAllucination Detection (HAD) models, which integrate hallucination detection, span-level identification, and correction into a single inference process. Trained on an elaborate synthetic dataset of about 90K samples, our HAD models are versatile and can be applied to various NLG tasks. We also carefully annotate a test set for hallucination detection, called HADTest, which contains 2,248 samples. Evaluations on in-domain and out-of-domain test sets show that our HAD models generally outperform the existing baselines, achieving state-of-the-art results on HaluEval, FactCHD, and FaithBench, confirming their robustness and versatility.

HAD: HAllucination Detection Language Models Based on a Comprehensive Hallucination Taxonomy

Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely used for code generation, but their performance degrades on tasks requiring multi-step logical reasoning. In practice, reliability is often improved through multi-sample inference, but its cost grows linearly with the sample size, making it impractical under strict latency constraints. To address these constraints, we propose Reason-Code, an inference-time framework that formulates code generation as a search process guided by execution feedback. This system integrates Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) with a lightweight execution sandbox, where candidate programs are evaluated via unit tests. To control inference cost, Reason-Code adopts a conditional budgeting strategy that activates search only when greedy generation fails. While Best-of-$N$ sampling can improve accuracy, its inference cost grows linearly with $N$, making it impractical under strict latency budgets. Experiments on HumanEval and MBPP show that Reason-Code matches strong sampling baselines with lower token cost and no regression, while UCB-guided exploration outperforms random search under the same budget.

Reason-Code: Reliable Code Generation via Test-Driven Monte Carlo Tree Search

We deploy large language models (LLMs) as business development (BD) agents for persuasive price negotiation in online travel agencies (OTAs). The agent must follow a multi-stage Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) and strict guardrails (no over-promising and no hallucinations), while remaining human-like and effective over long, multi-turn dialogues.
We propose Reward-Enhanced Policy Optimization (REPO), a reinforcement learning post-training method that combines heterogeneous rewards: a preference-trained reward model (RM), an LLM-as-a-judge (RJ) for nuanced behaviors (e.g., emotional value and SOP compliance), and rule-based reward functions (RF) (mainly regex-based) for deterministic checks on numerics, formatting, and guardrails.In expert consensus evaluation (three human experts; 30 online conversations and 45 curated bad cases), REPO improves average dialogue rating to 4.63 (+0.33 over GRPO) and raises the share of conversations with at least one excellent response to 66.67\% (+23.34 pp over GRPO), while achieving a 93.33\% bad-case fix rate with 75.56\% clean fixes.
In a production A/B test on 9{,}653 real customer conversations (vs.\ an intent-driven dialogue system), REPO improves response rate by +12.14 pp and task success rate by +5.94 pp ($p<0.001$).

Teaching LLM to be Persuasive: Reward-Enhanced Policy Optimization for Alignment from Heterogeneous Rewards

We introduce anonym-embed, a family of multilingual embedding models that employ multi-stage contrastive learning on a diffusion-pretrained language model backbone for web-scale retrieval.
By leveraging bidirectional attention through diffusion-based pretraining, our models capture comprehensive bidirectional context within passages, enabling the use of mean pooling to better preserve global context across long documents.
We release anonym-embed-v1 for standard retrieval, and anonym-embed-context-v1 for contextualized embeddings that incorporate global document context into passage representations.
anonym-embed-v1 achieves competitive performance on the MTEB(Multilingual, v2), MTEB(Code), BERGEN, and ToolRet retrieval benchmarks, while anonym-embed-context-v1 sets new records on the ConTEB benchmark.

Diffusion-Pretrained Dense and Contextual Embeddings

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a key component in industrial information extraction pipelines, where systems must satisfy strict latency and throughput constraints in addition to strong accuracy. State-of-the-art NER accuracy is often achieved by span-based frameworks, which construct span representations from token encodings and classify candidate spans. However, many span-based methods enumerate large numbers of candidates and process each candidate with marker-augmented inputs, substantially increasing inference cost and limiting scalability in large-scale deployments. 
In this work, we propose SpanDec, an efficient span-based NER framework that targets this bottleneck. Our main insight is that span representation interactions can be computed effectively at the final transformer stage, avoiding redundant computation in earlier layers via a lightweight decoder dedicated to span representations. We further introduce a span filtering mechanism during enumeration to prune unlikely candidates before expensive processing. Across multiple benchmarks, SpanDec matches competitive span-based baselines while improving throughput and reducing computational cost, yielding a better accuracy--efficiency trade-off suitable for high-volume serving and on-device applications.

Decoding Text Spans for Efficient and Accurate Named-Entity Recognition

Adapting Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) to specialized domains typically demands resource-intensive fine-tuning or access to proprietary parameters (``white-box'' access). While decoding-time strategies like Proxy Tuning offer a parameter-efficient alternative, they rely on rigid, static logit arithmetic that fails to account for instance-specific variations in model certainty and domain shift. In this work, we introduce Adaptive Weighted Proxy Tuning (AWPT), a gray-box steering framework that dynamically modulates the logit contributions of a large base model, a fine-tuned expert, and an untuned anti-expert. Unlike static approaches, AWPT introduces two instance-aware mechanisms: (1) a lightweight ViT-based Weight Predictor that performs amortized inference to estimate optimal mixing coefficients in real-time with negligible added latency ($\sim$0.03s overhead), and (2) a Per-Sample Optimization objective that establishes theoretical performance bounds via gradient-based logit steering. Extensive evaluation across medical (ROCOv2, IU-Xray) and general domains (Flickr30k, MS COCO, TextCaps) demonstrates that AWPT achieves performance parity with fully fine-tuned models while remaining parameter-free regarding the generator. Crucially, our dynamic weighting acts as an effective regularizer, significantly reducing object hallucinations and establishing AWPT as a robust solution for deploying general-purpose LVLMs in safety-critical contexts.

Adaptive Weighted Proxy Tuning: Efficient Gray-Box Steering for Image Captioning

Recent advances in LLMs have accelerated both information generation and misinformation, especially in low-resource languages like Vietnamese, motivating robust fact-checking systems. Existing methods struggle with semantic ambiguity, homonyms, and complex linguistic structures, often trading accuracy for efficiency. We introduce SemViQA, a novel Vietnamese fact-checking framework integrating Semantic-based Evidence Retrieval (SER) and Two-step Verdict Classification (TVC). Our approach balances precision and speed, achieving state-of-the-art results with 78.97% strict accuracy on ISE-DSC01 and 80.82% on ViWikiFC, securing 1st place in the UIT Data Science Challenge. Additionally, SemViQA Faster improves inference speed 7× while maintaining competitive accuracy. SemViQA sets a new benchmark for Vietnamese fact verification, advancing the fight against misinformation.

SemViQA: A Semantic Question Answering System for Vietnamese Information Fact-Checking

This paper presents a novel extension of neural scaling laws to Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models, focusing on the optimal allocation of compute between expert and attention sub-layers. As MoE architectures have emerged as an efficient method for scaling model capacity without proportionally increasing computation, determining the optimal expert-attention compute ratio becomes critical. We define the ratio $r$ as the fraction of total FLOPs per token dedicated to the expert layers versus the attention layers, and explore how this ratio interacts with the overall compute budget and model sparsity. Through extensive experiments with GPT-style MoE Transformers, we empirically find that the optimal ratio $r^\*$ follows a power-law relationship with total compute and varies with sparsity. Our analysis leads to an explicit formula for $r^\*$, enabling precise control over the expert-attention compute allocation. We generalize the Chinchilla scaling law by incorporating this architectural parameter, providing a new framework for tuning MoE models beyond size and data. Our findings offer practical guidelines for designing efficient MoE models, optimizing performance while respecting fixed compute budgets.

Optimal Expert-Attention Allocation in Mixture-of-Experts: A Scalable Law for Dynamic Model Design

Reviewing medical records for clinical and insurance decisions must handle long, heterogeneous documents while producing consistent, traceable, guideline-compliant outcomes under strict latency and cost constraints. We propose GuideTree, which compiles textual guidelines into a fixed review tree of evidence-grounded verification primitives. GuideTree uses short per-document summaries only for routing each check to a minimal set of document types and candidates; final verification always reads full document text and returns structured evidence. The tree is induced offline via a cost-aware split-and-prune search and updated safely through regression-tested, versioned patches. Across 1,000 cases from four industrial review scenarios and four LLM backbones, GuideTree achieves 84.5--92.8 Macro-F1, outperforming the strongest non-expert baselines by 3.3--7.6 points and matching ExpertTree within 0.2--0.6 points (avg. 0.38). On chronic disease with Qwen3-235B-A22B-Instruct, GuideTree reduces average I/O volume to 74K input+output characters (-82% vs. long-context prompting) and average latency to 22s (-83% vs. long-context prompting), while reaching 99% decision consistency over K=5 reruns.

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SPARD: Self-Paced Curriculum for RL Alignment via Integrating Reward Dynamics and Data Utility

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Next from ACL 2026

SPARD: Self-Paced Curriculum for RL Alignment via Integrating Reward Dynamics and Data Utility

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ProtT3: Protein-to-Text Generation for Text-based Protein Understanding

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