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The AI Steerability 360 toolkit is an extensible, open‑source Python library for steering LLMs. Steering abstractions are designed around four model control surfaces: input (modification of the prompt), structural (modification of the model&#39;s weights or architecture), state (modification of the model&#39;s activations and attentions), and output (modification of the decoding or generation process). Steering methods exert control on the model through a common interface, termed a steering pipeline, which additionally allows for the composition of multiple steering methods. Comprehensive evaluation and comparison of steering methods/pipelines is facilitated by use case classes (for defining tasks) and a benchmark class (for performance comparison on a given task). The functionality provided by the toolkit significantly lowers the barrier to developing and comprehensively evaluating steering methods. The toolkit is Hugging Face native and is released under an Apache 2.0 license at \url{https://github.com/IBM/AISteer360}.

ACL 2026

AI Steerability 360: A Toolkit for Steering Large Language Models

The AI Steerability 360 toolkit is an extensible, open‑source Python library for steering LLMs. Steering abstractions are designed around four model control surfaces: input (modification of the prompt), structural (modification of the model's weights or architecture), state (modification of the model's activations and attentions), and output (modification of the decoding or generation process). Steering methods exert control on the model through a common interface, termed a steering pipeline, which additionally allows for the composition of multiple steering methods. Comprehensive evaluation and comparison of steering methods/pipelines is facilitated by use case classes (for defining tasks) and a benchmark class (for performance comparison on a given task). The functionality provided by the toolkit significantly lowers the barrier to developing and comprehensively evaluating steering methods. The toolkit is Hugging Face native and is released under an Apache 2.0 license at \url{https://github.com/IBM/AISteer360}.

demo

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>
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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.

Continuous monitoring of high-volume media streams requires systems that go beyond keyword alerts to deliver structured, actionable intelligence. We present a multi-agent media monitoring system that processes streaming articles through three stages: (1) a Matching Agent that uses a hybrid keyword-then-semantic matching approach, reducing agent invocations by \~20% (2) a batched multi-agent feature extraction, reducing core feature-extraction calls from 7 to 2 per article - a 71% reduction - with bounded quality tradeoffs; and (3) a Report Generation Agent that uses deterministic deduplication and density-based clustering. Four autonomous life-cycle agents manage the evolution of watchers.

Media-to-Insights: A Multi-Agent AI System for Continuous Media Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting

The extraction of structured information from raw text is a fundamental component of many NLP applications, including document retrieval, ranking, and relevance estimation. High-quality extractions often require domain-specific accuracy, up-to-date understanding of specialized taxonomies, and the ability to incorporate emerging jargon and rare outliers. In many domains--such as medical, legal, and HR--the extraction model must also adapt to shifting terminology and benefit from explicit reasoning over structured knowledge. 
We propose DySECT, a Dynamic Self-Evolving Extraction and Curation Toolkit, which continually improves as it is used. The system incrementally populates a versatile, self-expanding knowledge base (KB) with triples extracted by the LLM. The KB further enriches itself through the integration of probabilistic knowledge and graph-based reasoning, gradually accumulating domain concepts and relationships. The enriched KB then feeds back into the LLM extractor via prompt tuning, sampling of relevant few-shot examples, or fine-tuning using KB-derived synthetic data. As a result, the system forms a symbiotic closed-loop cycle in which extraction continuously improves knowledge, and knowledge continuously improves extraction.

A Dynamic Self-Evolving Extraction System

Expert pruning is a practical deployment technique for Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models. It reduces resource usage and mitigates expert redundancy, but its success depends strongly on the calibration set used for pruning. In domain-general settings, it is unclear which properties of the calibration data drive good pruning outcomes, and the effects of calibration perturbations are often unintuitive. We observe, for example, that calibration sets in different languages can lead to very similar pruning results despite appearing dissimilar on the surface.
To address this, we propose Expert Calibration Lens, a lightweight analysis tool that compares expert activation patterns across datasets to predict the impact of calibration perturbations without repeatedly running expensive pruning procedures. We use activations that are quick to compute and evaluate the resulting analysis for downstream task performance.

Expert Calibration Lens for Pruning Mixture of Experts

Building LLM-based agents has become increasingly important. Recent works on LLM-based agent self-evolution primarily record successful experiences as textual prompts or reflections, which cannot reliably guarantee efficient task re-execution in complex scenarios. We propose AgentFactory, a new self-evolution paradigm that preserves successful task solutions as executable subagent code rather than textual experience. Crucially, these subagents are continuously refined based on execution feedback, becoming increasingly robust and efficient as more tasks are encountered. Saved subagents are pure Python code with standardized documentation, enabling portability across any Python-capable system. We demonstrate that AgentFactory enables continuous capability accumulation: its library of executable subagents grows and improves over time, progressively reducing the effort required for similar tasks without manual intervention. Our implementation is open-sourced at \url{https://github.com/zzatpku/AgentFactory}, and our demonstration video is available at \url{https://youtu.be/iKSsuAXJHW0}.

AgentFactory: A Self-Evolving Framework Through Executable Subagent Accumulation and Reuse

We introduce GameDAI, a hierarchical multi-agent framework that transforms instructor-provided questions into fully playable, pedagogically grounded educational games validated through formal mechanic contracts. Built on phase-based LangGraph sub-graphs, deterministic Quality Gates, and structured Pydantic schemas, GameDAI supports two template families encompassing 15 interaction mechanics across spatial reasoning, procedural execution, and higher-order Bloom's Taxonomy objectives.
Evaluated on 200 questions spanning five subject domains, the system achieves a 90% validation pass rate, 98.3% schema compliance, and 73% token reduction over ReAct agents $73,500 → $19,900 tokens/game) at $0.46 per game. Within this model configuration, these results suggest that phase-bounded architectural structure correlates more strongly with alignment quality than prompting strategy alone.
Our demonstration lets attendees generate Bloom's-aligned games from natural language in under 60 seconds, inspect Quality Gate outputs at each pipeline phase, and browse a curated library of 50 games spanning all 15 mechanic types.

GAMED.AI: A Hierarchical Multi-Agent Framework for Automated Educational Game Generation

This paper introduces a new multi-agent framework, CMTD (Cognitive Modeling with Traits and Distortions), for multimodal emotion recognition in conversations (MERC). Instead of relying on shallow analysis of emotions, CMTD reconstructs a cognitive model by taking advantage of stable personality traits, dynamic cognitive distortions, visual and acoustic features of interlocutors to enhance the emotional intelligence of LLMs. CMTD includes trait, distortion detection, vision, and speech agents that provide psychological and multimodal indicators for the fusion agent to make the final prediction. Experimental results on MELD and IEMOCAP show that traits temper negativity bias from distortions, and cognitive modeling with psychological, visual, and acoustic information can improve the performance of MERC.
CMTD is flexible and easy to adapt to advanced emotional AI systems (Github link: https://github.com/Shaun-le/CMTD.git).

CMTD: Cognitive Modeling with Traits and Distortions for Multimodal Emotion Recognition in Conversations

Culturally aware safeguards are crucial for AI alignment in real-world settings, where safety extends beyond common sense and encompasses diverse local values, norms, and region-specific regulations. However, building large-scale, culturally grounded datasets is challenging due to limited resources and a scarcity of native annotators. Consequently, many safeguard models rely on machine translation of English datasets, often missing regional and cultural nuances. We present a novel agentic data-generation framework to scalably create authentic, region-specific safety datasets for Southeast Asia (SEA). On this foundation, we introduce the SEA-Guard family, the first multilingual safeguard models grounded in SEA cultural contexts. Evaluated across multiple benchmarks and cultural variants, SEA-Guard consistently outperforms existing safeguards at detecting regionally sensitive or harmful content while maintaining strong general safety performance.

SEA-Guard: Culturally Grounded Multilingual Safeguard for Southeast Asia

While Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable reasoning, complex optimization tasks remain challenging, requiring domain knowledge and robust implementation. However, existing benchmarks focus narrowly on Mathematical Programming and Combinatorial Optimization, hindering comprehensive evaluation. To address this, we introduce OptiVerse, a comprehensive benchmark of 1,000 curated problems spanning neglected domains, including Stochastic Optimization, Dynamic Optimization, Game Optimization, and Optimal Control, across three difficulty levels: Easy, Medium, and Hard. The experiments with 22 LLMs of different sizes reveal sharp performance degradation on hard problems, where even advanced models like GPT-5.2 and Gemini-3 struggle to exceed 27% accuracy. Through error analysis, we identify that modeling & logic errors remain the primary bottleneck. Consequently, we propose a Dual-View Auditor Agent that improves the accuracy of the LLM modeling process without introducing significant time overhead. OptiVerse will serve as a foundational platform for advancing LLMs in solving complex optimization challenges.

OptiVerse: A Comprehensive Benchmark towards Optimization Problem Solving

Safeguard models help large language models (LLMs) detect and block harmful content, but most evaluations remain English-centric and overlook linguistic and cultural diversity. Existing multilingual safety benchmarks often rely on machine-translated English data, which fails to capture nuances in low-resource languages. Southeast Asian (SEA) languages are underrepresented despite the region’s linguistic diversity and unique safety concerns, from culturally sensitive political speech to region-specific misinformation. Addressing these gaps requires benchmarks that are natively authored to reflect local norms and harm scenarios. We introduce SEA-SafeguardBench, the first human-verified safety benchmark for SEA, covering eight languages, 21,640 samples, across three subsets: general, in-the-wild, and content generation. The experimental results from our benchmark demonstrate that even state-of-the-art LLMs and guardrails are challenged by SEA cultural and harm scenarios and underperform when compared to English texts.

SEA-SafeguardBench: Culturally Grounded Safety Benchmark for Southeast Asian Languages

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have exhibited strong reasoning capabilities through chain-of-thought mechanisms that generate step-by-step rationales. However, such slow-thinking approaches often lead to overthinking, where models produce excessively verbose responses even for simple queries, resulting in test-time inefficiency and even degraded accuracy. Prior work has attempted to mitigate this issue via adaptive reasoning strategies, but these methods largely overlook a fundamental bottleneck: visual perception failures. We argue that stable reasoning critically depends on low-level visual grounding, and that reasoning errors often originate from imperfect perception rather than insufficient deliberation. To address this limitation, we propose Gated Perception-Reasoning Optimization (GPRO), a meta-reasoning controller that dynamically routes computation among three decision paths at each generation step: a lightweight fast path, a slow perception path for re-examining visual inputs, and a slow reasoning path for internal self-reflection. To learn this distinction, we derive large-scale failure attribution supervision from approximately 790k samples, using teacher models to distinguish perceptual hallucinations from reasoning errors. We then train the controller with multi-objective reinforcement learning to optimize the trade-off between task accuracy and computational cost under uncertainty. Experiments on five benchmarks demonstrate that GPRO substantially improves both accuracy and efficiency, outperforming recent slow-thinking methods while generating significantly shorter responses.

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Media-to-Insights: A Multi-Agent AI System for Continuous Media Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting

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