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Recent work has shown that LLMs develop internally coherent utility functions that emerge with scale, yet whether these value systems encode systematic demographic hierarchies remains unexplored. We elicit pairwise preferences across 15 intersectional demographic groups (defined by race, gender, and their combinations) and 8 policy domains on three 7--8B instruction-tuned LLMs, fitting Thurstonian utility models to the resulting preference matrices. All three models converge on a compensatory hierarchy that inverts real-world structural advantage, consistently ranking marginalized groups, the highest and dominant groups are lowest. Intersectional utilities do not combine additively: single-axis audits that measure gender and race gaps independently overestimate the most extreme intersectional gap by 26- 40\% in our experiments. Geometrically, we identify a linear direction in the representation space that predicts the full utility hierarchy from neutral sentences alone, and show that this direction is substantially aligned with gender encoding but not with race encoding. Orthogonalization reveals that gender separation in representations is not fully explained by utility encoding. The hierarchy is already present in base (pre-alignment) models and is amplified several-fold by instruction tuning, suggesting it originates in pre-training data rather than alignment procedures.

ACL 2026

Convergent Demographic Utility Hierarchies: Geometry of Intersectional Values in LLMs

# Welcome everyone to ACL 2022!

The 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics is taking place May 22-27, 2022 as a hybrid event, in Dublin and online. We are happy to welcome all of you to this anniversary edition with an almost 50-50 in-person and virtual participation. 
The main conference program features oral presentations, in-person and virtual posters and demo sessions, a plenary session for our best paper presentations and awards, three amazing keynote events and two new initiatives of invited talks: Spotlight Talks for Young Rising Stars (STIRS) and The Next Big Idea Talks. Posters (including Findings of ACL 2022) and demos are grouped by areas for both the in-person and the virtual sessions. For the virtual component, the talks will be on Zoom and the posters and the demos will be in GatherTown. The Student Research Workshop will have an oral session and a poster session as part of Poster Session 1. The program also features eight Tutorials and 28 Workshops. 

 
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ACL 2022

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing (NLP). 

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

There are now multiple proposals for systems based on Large Language Models(LLMs) to conduct automated qualitative interviews. This approach scales up qualitative interview techniques that have traditionally been constrained by the high costs of data collection. However, most of the current solutions rely on proprietary LLMs, which compromise reproducibility and data security. They also rely on LLMs for all interview tasks, which limits standardisation of question wording as well as control over question order. To address these issues, we introduce the AInterviewer platform, based on a multi-agent framework that combines controlled question administration of survey software with the flexibility of LLMs. AInterviewer can run with locally hosted models to ensure security and transparency. Our platform provides a web-based GUI supporting each phase of data collection: from interview guide design and pilot testing to interview distribution and data collection monitoring.

AInterviewer: A Platform for Designing and Conducting AI-led Qualitative Interviews

We present **Dash-M5H**, an interactive dashboard for *multi-modal, multi-model mental health* assessment that helps clinicians and researchers jointly inspect multimodal behavioral data with multi-model signal outputs of recorded clinical interviews. Guided by signal detection and integrated sensemaking theories, Dash-M5H synchronizes transcript text, audio, and facial behavior (action units and gaze) to support overview-to-detail evidence tracing; and it integrates extracted signals (e.g., sentiment and facial activity) with a clinically grounded VLM prediction pipeline that produces DSM-5-aligned depression predictions. Dash-M5H (https://dash-m5h.io) is implemented in a lightweight, browser-based stack (Quarto + Observable JS + D3), supports local data import and time-synced clinical annotation with export. We demonstrate Dash-M5H through a depression screening scenario, evaluate its note-taking and screening capabilities through a user experiment, and release a live demo (https://youtu.be/w3qCJ02k6bw) and code (https://github.com/nd-hal/M5H-Dashboard-VLM) to facilitate reproducible evaluation.

Dash-M5H: An Interactive Dashboard for Multi-Modal, Multi-Model Mental Health Assessment

Large language models (LLMs) frequently generate factually incorrect or unverifiable statements, motivating tool-augmented verification systems that combine model reasoning with external evidence retrieval. For factuality evaluation to be scientifically reliable, verification pipelines must be controllable and reproducible: retrieval configuration and reasoning behavior should be explicitly configurable and stable across runs. In practice, many existing systems depend on commercial search APIs whose ranking policies and retrieval behaviors are opaque and externally controlled, introducing uncontrolled variability into evaluation. This makes it difficult to disentangle reasoning errors from retrieval effects. We present FactSearch, a reproducible, claim-level factuality verification system built on locally aggregated open-source search infrastructure. FactSearch decomposes model outputs into atomic factual claims, retrieves supporting evidence via a self-hosted meta-search engine, and performs modular verification within a fully configurable pipeline. By treating retrieval infrastructure as a first-class component, the system enables deterministic configurations and systematic analysis of retrieval–reasoning interactions. An interactive web interface supports transparent inspection and practical deployment. A demo video is available at: 
\href{https://youtu.be/qbfA2vIxsiI}{https://youtu.be/qbfA2vIxsiI}. Code is at \href{https://github.com/aialt/factsearch}{https://github.com/aialt/factsearch}.

FactSearch: An Interactive Fact Search and Claim-Level Verification System for Large Language Models

Gardener is an interactive agentic system for single-cell RNA-seq (scRNA-seq) analysis that enables expert-steered, iterative workflows under strict data-residency requirements. Existing large language model (LLM)-based analysis agents commonly encode workflow progress as implicit conversational state and rely on cloud-centric execution, which hinders traceability and auditability and complicates keeping sensitive expression data on-device. Gardener grounds cloud-side reasoning in a local, on-device scientific engine and an Experiment Management Kernel (EMK) that externalizes analysis progress as persistent, immutable snapshots linked by lineage. This explicit state representation supports rollback, branching, and comparison of alternative analysis paths while reusing prior computation. Gardener enforces data isolation by design: cloud-hosted LLMs operate only on snapshot identifiers and sanitized summaries, while raw expression matrices and local artifacts remain on the user’s device. A local graphical user interface (GUI) provides human-in-the-loop steering and inspection of workflow state and outputs. Gardener is released as an open-source desktop application for macOS and Windows under the Apache License 2.0.

Gardener: An Agentic AI System for Single-Cell RNA Sequence Analysis

Clinical decision-making requires synthesizing heterogeneous evidence, including patient histories, clinical guidelines, and trajectories of comparable cases. While large language models (LLMs) offer strong reasoning capabilities, they remain prone to hallucinations and struggle to integrate long, structured medical documents. We present MED-COPILOT, an interactive clinical decision-support system designed for clinicians and medical trainees, which combines guideline-grounded GraphRAG retrieval with hybrid semantic–keyword similar-patient retrieval to support transparent and evidence-aware clinical reasoning. The system builds a structured knowledge graph from WHO and NICE guidelines, applies community-level summarization for efficient retrieval, and maintains a 36,000-case similar-patient database derived from SOAP-normalized MIMIC-IV notes and Synthea-generated records.

We evaluate our framework on clinical note completion and medical question answering, and demonstrate that it consistently outperforms parametric LLM baselines and standard RAG, improving both generation fidelity and clinical reasoning accuracy. The full system is available at https://huggingface.co/spaces/Cryo3978/Med_GraphRAG
, enabling users to inspect retrieved evidence, visualize token-level similarity contributions, and conduct guided follow-up analysis. Our results demonstrate a practical and interpretable approach to integrating structured guideline knowledge with patient-level analogical evidence for clinical LLMs.

MED-COPILOT: A Medical Assistant Powered by GraphRAG and Similar Patient Case Retrieval

Deploying production-ready multi-agent systems (MAS) in complex industrial environments remains challenging due to limitations in scalability, observability, and autonomous evolution. We present OxyGent, an open-source framework that enables modular, observable, and evolvable MAS via a unified Oxy abstraction, in which agents, tools, LLMs, and reasoning flows are encapsulated as pluggable atomic components. This Lego-like assembly paradigm supports scalable system composition and non-intrusive monitoring. To enhance observability, OxyGent introduces permission-driven dynamic planning that replaces rigid workflows with execution graphs generated at runtime, which provide adaptive visualizations. To support continuous evolution, the framework integrates OxyBank, an AI asset management platform that supports automated data backflow, annotation, and joint evolution. Empirical evaluations and real-world case studies show that OxyGent provides a robust and scalable foundation for MAS. OxyGent is publicly available at \url{https://oxygent.jd.com/}.

OxyGent: Making Multi-Agent Systems Modular, Observable, and Evolvable via Oxy Abstraction

Effective interdisciplinary communication is frequently hindered by domain-specific terms. These terms, or jargon, are dependent on a listener's background, and rarely do listeners seek explanations due to distraction and social concerns. To address these concerns, we built ParseJargon, an interactive LLM-powered system providing real-time personalized jargon support tailored to users’ individual backgrounds in online meetings. We first evaluated the effectiveness of personalization in a controlled setting with human participants. By comparing ParseJargon against baseline (no support) and general-purpose (non-personalized) conditions, we found that ParseJargon provided more precise jargon identification, and enhanced participants' comprehension, engagement, and appreciation of colleagues' work. We then evaluated the potential for using ParseJargon in real-time meetings through a latency test.

ParseJargon: Personalized Real-time Jargon Support in Online Meetings

Empathy plays a crucial role in prosocial behavior and supportive human interactions. According to emotional validation theory, effective empathetic conversations require observing and reflecting on the help-seeker’s situation before offering emotional support and guidance. While recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have enabled fluent and coherent dialogue generation, our preliminary study reveals that existing LLMs struggle to generate emotional support response. Instead, they tend to offer repetitive solutions without sufficiently considering the emotional needs of help-seekers. To address this limitation, we propose \textbf{EVA}: empathetic LLMs with \textbf{E}motional \textbf{VA}lidation. EVA enhances empathetic response generation through a two-stage training process: empathy acquisition and emotional validation alignment. For the emotional validation alignment, we introduce the Emotional Validation Aware Dataset (EVAD), which is annotated with levels of emotional validation theory as conversations progress. Additionally, we propose EVAEval, a novel evaluation metric designed to assess whether a model-generated response aligns with emotional validation theory. Experimental results demonstrate that the EVA method significantly improves empathetic response generation, achieving superior performance in both automatic and human evaluations. Furthermore, comprehensive analyses confirm that the EVA method effectively mitigates patterned responses while ensuring adherence to emotional validation principles.

I Don't Need Solution. I Need Emotional Support \n : Empathetic LLMs based on Emotional Validation

Text-to-image (T2I) models have achieved remarkable progress in high-quality image synthesis, yet most benchmarks rely on simple, self-contained prompts, failing to capture the complexity of real-world captions. Human-written captions often involve multiple interacting subjects, rich contextual references, and abstractive phrasing, conditions under which current image-text encoders like CLIP struggle. To systematically study these deficiencies, we introduce ANCHOR, a large-scale dataset of 70K+ abstractive captions sourced from five major news media organizations. Analysis with ANCHOR reveals persistent failures in multi-subject understanding, context reasoning, and nuanced grounding. Motivated by these challenges, we propose Subject-Aware Fine-tuning (SAFE), which uses Large Language Models (LLMs) to extract key subjects and enhance their representation at the embedding-level. Experiments with contemporary models show that SAFE significantly improves image-caption consistency and human preference alignment, serving as a practical and scalable solution. The dataset and code will be released upon publication.

ANCHOR: LLM-driven Subject Conditioning for Text-to-Image Synthesis

The inherent rigidity of fixed-size benchmarks makes them an inefficient tool for model evaluation. Diverse evaluation objectives, including model ranking, model selection and testing throughout development, demand varying levels of statistical power. The mismatch between fixed sample sizes and these diverse needs results in either excessive computational cost or compromised reliability – a critical concern for model evaluation. To overcome these limitations, we call for adoption of sequential testing in our field. We provide an adaptive evaluation framework, that provides a principled way to navigate the trade-off between efficiency and reliability in model evaluation. Our framework combines the established statistical paradigm of sequential testing with stopping criteria tailored to common evaluation needs such as diminishing returns detection, and minimum detectable effect size. We demonstrate its ability to adaptively manage the efficiency-reliability trade-off on the Open VLM Leaderboard, including, for example, a 80% reduction in computational cost compared to fixed-size evaluation (with a 2.5-point CI width allowance) while maintaining statistical significance.

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Next from ACL 2026

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