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Reasoning in humans is prone to biases due to underlying motivations like identity protection, that undermine rational decision-making and judgment. This motivated reasoning at a collective level can be detrimental to society when debating critical issues such as human-driven climate change or vaccine safety, and can further aggravate political polarization. Prior studies have reported that large language models (LLMs) are also susceptible to human-like cognitive biases, however, the extent to which LLMs selectively reason toward identity-congruent conclusions remains largely unexplored. Here, we investigate whether assigning 8 personas across 4 political and socio-demographic attributes induces motivated reasoning in LLMs. Testing 8 LLMs (open source and proprietary) across two reasoning tasks from human-subject studies --- veracity discernment of misinformation headlines and evaluation of numeric scientific evidence --- we find that persona-assigned LLMs have up to 9% reduced veracity discernment relative to models without personas. Political personas specifically are up to 90% more likely to correctly evaluate scientific evidence on gun control when the ground truth is congruent with their induced political identity. Prompt-based debiasing methods are largely ineffective at mitigating these effects. Taken together, our empirical findings are the first to suggest that persona-assigned LLMs exhibit human-like motivated reasoning that is hard to mitigate through conventional debiasing prompts --- raising concerns of exacerbating identity-congruent reasoning in both LLMs and humans.

ACL 2026

Persona-Assigned Large Language Models Exhibit Human-Like Motivated Reasoning

## Welcome!
"I am excited to welcome you to this year’s edition of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing! Importantly, it marks the 30th edition of EMNLP. With over 8,000 submissions, more than 3,000 accepted papers, and thousands of attendees, we have come a long way from that first
workshop, which had 14 accepted papers. As the field looks ahead, Suzhou is the fitting location for celebrating this milestone: rooted in a long literary tradition, yet modern and forward-looking, and home to a large share of the NLP community." 

*Message from the General Chair, Dirk Hovy*

EMNLP 2025

Celebrate 30 Years of EMNLP! 
EMNLP 2025 will be held in Suzhou, China from November 5th to November 9th, 2025.

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. 
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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.

Previous research has sought to enhance the graph reasoning capabilities of LLMs by supervised fine-tuning on synthetic graph data. While these led to specialized LLMs better at solving graph algorithm problems, we don't need LLMs for shortest path: we need generalization from synthetic graph data to real-world tasks with implicit graph structures. In this work, we propose to unlock generalizable learning of graph with post-training alignment with synthetic data. We first design solution-based and process-based rewards for synthetic graph problems: instead of rigid memorizing response patterns in direct fine-tuning, we posit that post-training alignment would help LLMs grasp the essentials underlying graph reasoning and alleviate overfitting on synthetic data. We employ post-training alignment algorithms such as GRPO and DPO, aligning both off-the-shelf LLMs and LLMs fine-tuned on synthetic graph data. We then compare them against existing settings on both in-domain synthetic tasks and out-of-domain real-world tasks with implicit graph structures such as multi-hop QA, structured planning, and more. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our post-training alignment recipe leads to statistically significant improvement on 5 datasets, with an average gain of 12.9% over baseline settings. Further analysis reveals that process-based rewards consistently outperform solution-based rewards on synthetic data but not on real-world tasks, and compositionality and explainable intermediate steps remains a critical challenge even after post-training alignment.

Generalizable LLM Learning of Graph Synthetic Data with Post-training Alignment

We propose Data Swarms, an algorithm to optimize the generation of synthetic evaluation data and advance quantitative desiderata of LLM evaluation. We first train a swarm of initial data generators using existing data, and define various evaluation objectives to reflect the desired properties of evaluation (e.g., generate more difficult problems for the evaluated models) and quantitatively evaluate data generators. We then employ particle swarm optimization to optimize the swarm of data generators, where they collaboratively search through the model parameter space to find new generators that advance these objectives. We further extend it to Adversarial Swarms, where the data generator swarm generates harder data while the test taker model swarm learns from such data, co-evolving dynamically for better data and models simultaneously. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Data Swarms outperforms eight data generation baselines across five evaluation objectives, while Adversarial Swarms produce more robust learning of synthetic data and stronger generalization. Further analysis reveals that Data Swarms successfully optimizes compositions of multiple evaluation objectives and generalizes to new off-the-shelf LLMs, unseen at optimization time.

 Data Swarms: Optimizable Generation of Synthetic Evaluation Data

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit non-stationary generation: their output distributions shift with prompts, retrieved documents, and decoding conditions. Under such variability, average likelihood metrics can obscure heterogeneous behaviors across samples, especially in high-surprisal tails where failures often occur. We propose an information-spectrum-based diagnostic framework that treats LLMs as general sources without assuming stationarity, ergodicity, or the asymptotic equipartition property. We define sequence-level self-information density (coding rate; mean surprisal) and construct an empirical information spectrum from finite samples, enabling operational estimates of spectrum quantiles and width. We further introduce an information gain spectrum, a teacher-forced likelihood-based measure that evaluates the same generated sequence with and without side information. Across multiple Japanese LLMs and QA settings, we observe that correctness differences are often more visible in the high-surprisal tail than in the mean coding rate, and that side information can reshape tail behavior in heterogeneous ways across sequences. We also observe that instruction tuning changes the spectrum structure, making tail statistics and spectrum width more predictive of correctness than the mean coding rate. Overall, our analysis illustrates how spectrum-based diagnostics complement average-based metrics for understanding conditional generation.

Diagnosing LLMs via Information Spectrum Analysis: Tail Behavior and the Effects of Side Information

Reward-guided search methods have demonstrated strong potential in enhancing tool-using agents by effectively guiding sampling and exploration over complex action spaces. As a core design, those search methods utilize process reward models (PRMs) to provide step-level rewards, enabling more fine-grained monitoring. However, there is a lack of systematic and reliable evaluation benchmarks for PRMs in tool-use settings. In this paper, we introduce ToolPRMBench, a large-scale benchmark specifically designed to evaluate PRMs for tool-using agents. ToolPRMBench is built on top of several representative tool-use benchmarks and converts agent trajectories into step-level test cases. Each case contains the interaction history, a correct action, a plausible but incorrect alternative, and relevant tool metadata. We respectively utilize offline sampling to isolate local single-step errors and online sampling to capture realistic multi-step failures from full agent rollouts. A multi-LLM verification pipeline is proposed to reduce label noise and ensure data quality. We conduct extensive experiments across large language models, general PRMs, and tool-specialized PRMs on ToolPRMBench. The results reveal clear differences in PRM effectiveness and highlight the potential of specialized PRMs for tool-using. Our code and dataset are available at: \url{https://github.com/David-Li0406/ToolPRMBench}\footnote{More resources on \textbf{LLM-as-a-judge} are on the website: \url{https://llm-as-a-judge.github.io}}.

 ToolPRMBench: Evaluating and Advancing Process Reward Models for Tool-using Agents

Using LLMs not to predict plans but to formalize an environment into the Planning Domain Definition Language (PDDL) has been shown to improve performance and control. While most existing methodology only applies to fully observable environments, we adapt to the more realistic and challenging partially observable environments without sufficient information to make a complete plan. We propose PDDLego+, a framework to iteratively formalize, plan, grow, and refine PDDL representations by decomposing the environment and the goal into fully observable episodes. Without fine‑tuning, in-context exemplars, or trajectories, PDDLego+ improves planning success and exhibits robustness against problem complexity compared to end-to-end approaches. We also show that the domain knowledge captured after a successful trial can benefit future tasks.

Iterative Formalization and Planning in Partially Observable Environments

Retrieving relevant tables from extensive databases for a given natural language query is essential for accurately answering questions in tasks such as text-to-SQL. Existing table retrieval approaches select a pre-determined set of $k$ tables with the highest similarity to the query. However, the number of required tables varies across queries and cannot be known in advance. Enforcing a fixed number of retrieved tables regardless of the query may either retrieve an undersized set, failing to obtain all necessary evidence, or retrieve an oversized pool, including irrelevant tables. To address this issue, we propose an adaptive table retrieval method that adjusts the number of tables retrieved according to the requirements of each query. Specifically, we utilize an adaptive thresholding mechanism to selectively retrieve tables and integrate a sliding-window reranking algorithm to efficiently process a large table corpus. Extensive experiments on Spider, BIRD, and Spider 2.0 demonstrate that our method effectively addresses the limitations of the top-$k$ retrieval strategy, improving performance in retrieval and downstream tasks. Our code and data are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Adaptive-Table-Retrieval.

Retrieve Only Relevant Tables Whether Few or Many: Adaptive Table Retrieval Method

Code-switching is a pervasive linguistic phenomenon in global communication, yet modern information retrieval systems remain predominantly designed for, and evaluated within, monolingual contexts. To bridge this critical disconnect, we present a holistic study dedicated to code-switching IR. We introduce CSR-L (Code-Switching Retrieval benchmark-Lite), constructing a dataset via human annotation to capture the authentic naturalness of mixed-language queries. Our evaluation across statistical, dense, and late-interaction paradigms reveals that code-switching acts as a fundamental performance bottleneck, degrading the effectiveness of even robust multilingual models. We demonstrate that this failure stems from substantial divergence in the embedding space between pure and code-switched text. Scaling this investigation, we propose CS-MTEB, a comprehensive benchmark covering 11 diverse tasks, where we observe performance declines of up to 27%. Finally, we show that standard multilingual techniques like vocabulary expansion are insufficient to resolve these deficits completely. These findings underscore the fragility of current systems and establish code-switching as a crucial frontier for future IR optimization.

Code-Switching Information Retrieval: Benchmarks, Analysis, and the Limits of Current Retrievers

Visually Rich Document Understanding (VRDU) has become a pivotal area of research, driven by the need to automatically interpret documents that contain intricate visual, textual, and structural elements. Recently, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated significant promise in this domain, including both OCR-based and OCR-free approaches for information extraction from document images. This survey reviews recent advances in MLLM-based VRDU, highlighting emerging trends and promising research directions with a focus on two key aspects: (1) techniques for representing and integrating textual, visual, and layout features; (2) training paradigms, including pretraining, instruction tuning, and training strategies. Moreover, we address challenges such as data scarcity, handling multi-page and multilingual documents, and integrating emerging trends such as Retrieval-Augmented Generation and agentic frameworks. Our analysis offers a roadmap for advancing MLLM-based VRDU toward more scalable, reliable, and adaptable systems.

A Survey on MLLM-based Visually Rich Document Understanding: Methods, Challenges, and Emerging Trends

Large language models (LLMs) have recently enabled remarkable progress in text representation. However, their embeddings are typically high-dimensional, leading to substantial storage and retrieval overhead. Although recent approaches such as Matryoshka Representation Learning (MRL) and Contrastive Sparse Representation (CSR) alleviate these issues to some extent, they still suffer from retrieval accuracy degradation. This paper proposes Isolation Kernel Embedding or IKE, a learning-free method that transforms an LLM embedding into a binary embedding using Isolation Kernel (IK). Lightweight and based on binary encoding, IKE offers a low memory footprint and fast bitwise computation, lowering retrieval latency. Experiments on multiple text retrieval datasets demonstrate that IKE offers up to 16.7$\times$ faster retrieval and 16$\times$ lower memory usage than the original LLM embeddings, while maintaining comparable accuracy. Theoretically, we show that IKE works because it satisfies four essential criteria for effective binary hashing that other methods do not possess. Compared to CSR, IKE consistently achieves better retrieval efficiency and effectiveness. IKE also works effectively with graph-based indexing, demonstrating its superiority in balancing accuracy and latency compared to alternative compression techniques in the approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) search setting.

LLMs Meet Isolation Kernel: Lightweight, Learning-free Binary Embeddings for Fast Retrieval

Recent advances in mobile Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents highlight the growing need for comprehensive evaluation benchmarks. While new online benchmarks offer more realistic testing than offline ones, they tend to focus on the agents' task instruction-following ability while neglecting their reasoning and exploration ability. Moreover, these benchmarks do not consider the random noise in real-world mobile environments. This leads to a gap between benchmarks and real-world environments. To addressing these limitations, we propose MobileBench-OL, an online benchmark with 1080 tasks from 80 Chinese apps. It measures task execution, complex reasoning, and noise robustness of agents by including 5 subsets, which set multiple evaluation dimensions. We also provide an auto-eval framework with a reset mechanism, enabling stable and repeatable real-world benchmarking. Evaluating 13 leading GUI agents on MobileBench-OL shows significant room for improvement to meet real-world requirements. Human evaluation further confirms that MobileBench-OL can reliably measure the performance of leading GUI agents in real environments.

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