United States

Synthetic clinical data are essential for advancing AI in healthcare, given strict privacy constraints on electronic health records (EHRs), the scarcity of annotated data for rare or slowly progressing conditions, and demographic biases in observational cohorts. Large language models (LLMs) can generate fluent clinical text, but ensuring that such outputs are both clinically grounded and useful for downstream modeling remains challenging. We present DualAlign, a disease-agnostic framework for generating privacy-preserving, clinically faithful synthetic EHR narratives. DualAlign improves generation fidelity through two complementary alignment mechanisms: persona alignment, which conditions generation on patient demographics and risk factors, and symptom-trajectory alignment, which grounds narratives in empirically observed longitudinal symptom patterns. Using Alzheimer’s disease (AD) as a case study, DualAlign produces context-aware, symptom-rich sentences that more closely reflect real-world clinical documentation. Augmenting limited gold-standard data with DualAlign substantially improves AD symptom classification, outperforming both gold-only training and unconstrained synthetic baselines. Overall, DualAlign provides a generalizable approach for generating high-utility synthetic clinical text in chronic and progressive diseases, reducing annotation burden while enabling scalable and privacy-conscious clinical NLP research.

ACL 2026

DualAlign: Generating Clinically Grounded Synthetic Data

### Welcome to the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL) 
Continuing its mission of expanding and involving the science community of all European countries, EACL had selected the Ukrainian community for the 16th EACL, which took place online due to the COVID pandemic. Unfortunately, the ongoing war made the organisation in Kyiv impossible. Considering the importance of physical interaction among researchers, especially after the restrictions imposed by the COVID pandemic, in addition to an online mode, the conference will be held in Dubrovnik, Croatia, from 2 to 6 of May, 2023. The original aim of strengthening the connection with the Ukrainian community will not change as our program will feature a dedicated session and a workshop to highlight work on Ukrainian language technologies. As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.

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EACL 2023

As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.

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.

Small Language Models (SLMs) provide computational advantages in resource-constrained environments, yet memory limitations remain a critical bottleneck for edge device deployment. A substantial portion of SLMs' memory footprint stems from vocabulary-related components, particularly embeddings and language modeling (LM) heads, due to large vocabulary sizes. Existing static vocabulary pruning, while reducing memory usage, suffers from rigid, one-size-fits-all designs that cause information loss during the prefill stage and lack flexibility. In this work, we identify two key principles underlying the vocabulary reduction challenge: the *lexical locality* principle, the observation that only a small subset of tokens is required during any single inference, and the *asymmetry in computational characteristics* between vocabulary-related components of SLM. Based on these insights, we introduce VocabTailor, a novel decoupled dynamic vocabulary selection framework that addresses memory constraints through offloading embedding and implements a hybrid static-dynamic vocabulary selection strategy for LM Head, enabling on-demand loading of vocabulary components. Comprehensive experiments across diverse downstream tasks demonstrate that **VocabTailor** achieves a reduction of up to 99% in the memory usage of vocabulary-related components with minimal or no degradation in task performance, substantially outperforming existing static vocabulary pruning. Our code is available at https://github.com/AwakenedInsects/VocabTailor.

VocabTailor: Dynamic Vocabulary Selection for Downstream Tasks in Small Language Models

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems are typically evaluated under static assumptions, despite being frequently corrected through user or expert feedback in deployment. Existing evaluation protocols focus on overall accuracy and fail to capture how systems adapt after feedback is introduced. We introduce feedback adaptation as a problem setting for RAG systems, which asks how effectively and how quickly corrective feedback propagates to future queries. To make this behavior measurable, we propose two evaluation axes: correction lag, which captures the delay between feedback provision and behavioral change, and post-feedback performance, which measures reliability on semantically related queries after feedback. Using these metrics, we show that training-based approaches exhibit a trade-off between delayed correction and reliable adaptation. We further propose PatchRAG, a minimal inference-time instantiation that incorporates feedback without retraining, demonstrating immediate correction and strong post-feedback generalization under the proposed evaluation. Our results highlight feedback adaptation as a previously overlooked dimension of RAG system behavior in interactive settings.

Feedback Adaptation for Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Standard evaluations of backdoor attacks on text-to-image (T2I) models primarily measure trigger activation and visual fidelity. We challenge this paradigm, demonstrating that encoder-side poisoning induces persistent, trigger-free semantic corruption that fundamentally reshapes the representation manifold. We trace this vulnerability to a geometric mechanism: a Jacobian-based analysis reveals that backdoors act as low-rank, target-centered deformations that amplify local sensitivity, causing distortion to propagate coherently across semantic neighborhoods. To rigorously quantify this structural degradation, we introduce SEMAD (Semantic Alignment and Drift), a diagnostic framework that measures both internal embedding drift and downstream functional misalignment. Our findings, validated across diffusion and contrastive paradigms, expose the deep structural risks of encoder poisoning and highlight the necessity of geometric audits beyond simple attack success rates.

When Backdoors Go Beyond Triggers: Semantic Drift in Diffusion Models Under Encoder Attacks

Large Language Models (LLMs) show promise in medical Question-Answering (QA) but suffer from hallucinations that jeopardize patient safety. While Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) mitigates this by grounding outputs in external evidence, existing pipelines struggle with the complex, rapidly evolving nature of oncology. We present **CoMeta**, a three-level controllable metadata-aware framework optimized for Cancer Patient QA (CPQA). We introduce Clinical Hybrid Semantic-Symbolic Document Retrieval (CHSDR), which synergizes real-time Boolean search via NCBI E-Utilities with semantic retrieval to overcome metadata blindness. Additionally, we propose Semantic Enhanced Overlap Segmentation (SEOS) to prevent contextual fragmentation. Our results demonstrate that CHSDR significantly improves retrieval performance, CoMeta improved the answer accuracy of Claude-3-haiku by 5.24% over chain-of-thought prompting and about 3% over a naive RAG setup. This study highlights the importance of domain-specific query optimization in realizing the full potential of RAG and provides a robust framework for building more reliable CPQA systems.

Towards semantic reliable clinical QA: Query pipeline optimization for cancer patient question answering systems

Navigating biopharmaceutical intellectual property necessitates precisely associating visual chemical structures with their textual referents across lengthy documents. Despite its critical role in drug discovery, this multimodal coreference task remains underexplored. It presents unique challenges, including handling Markush structures and distinguishing the atom-level differences between adjacent structures. To bridge this gap, we define the multimodal Chemical Structure-Text coreference and introduce CheST, the first dataset explicitly designed for the task. Furthermore, to satisfy the strict logical consistency in the task, we propose RULER, a RULE-guided multimodal Reinforcement learning framework built upon an SFT cold start. RULER utilizes rule-driven reward functions operationalizing multidimensional consistencies, acting as a domain-specific "verifier" to obtain the correct domain knowledge. Experimental results demonstrate that RULER achieves a 40% improvement over the strongest baseline--Gemini-2.5-Pro, demonstrating the superior efficacy.

Multimodal Chemical Structure-Text Coreference in Intellectual Property via Rule-guided Reinforcement Learning

The rapid evolution of Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has advanced workflow automation; however, existing research mainly targets performance upper bounds in static environments, overlooking robustness for stochastic real-world deployment. We identify three key challenges: dynamic task scheduling, active exploration under uncertainty, and continuous learning from experience. To bridge this gap, we introduce TraineeBench, a dynamic evaluation environment that simulates a "trainee" agent continuously exploring a novel setting. Unlike traditional benchmarks, TraineeBench evaluates agents along three dimensions: (1) context-aware scheduling for streaming tasks with varying priorities; (2) prudent information acquisition to reduce hallucination via active exploration; and (3) continuous evolution by distilling generalized strategies from rule-based, dynamically generated tasks. Experiments show that cutting-edge agents have significant deficiencies in dynamic environments, especially in active exploration and continual learning. Our work establishes a framework for assessing agent reliability, shifting evaluation from static tests to realistic, production-oriented scenarios.

The Agent's First Day: Benchmarking Learning, Exploration, and Scheduling in the Workplace Scenarios

With the advancement of multimodal large language models (MLLMs), building GUI agent systems has become an increasingly promising direction—especially for mobile platforms, given their rich app ecosystems and intuitive touch interactions. Yet mobile GUI agents face a critical dilemma: truly on-device models (4B or smaller) lack sufficient performance, while capable models (starting from 7B) are either too large for mobile deployment or prohibitively costly (e.g., cloud-only closed-source MLLMs). To resolve this, we propose OpenPhone, a mobile GUI agent system that leverages device-cloud collaboration to tap the cost-efficiency of on-device models and the high capability of cloud models, while avoiding their drawbacks. Specifically, OpenPhone enhances Qwen2.5-VL-3B via two-stage SFT→GRPO training on synthetic GUI data for strong decision-making, integrates an efficient long-reasoning mechanism to utilize historical interactions under tight resources, and defaults to on-device execution—only escalating challenging subtasks to the cloud via real-time complexity assessment. Experiments on the online AndroidLab benchmark and diverse apps show OpenPhone matches or nears larger models, with a significant reduction in cloud costs.

OpenPhone: Mobile Agentic Foundation Models

This study demonstrates an alignment of per-word processing time in a popular state-space language model Mamba and human readers. In Mamba, the recurrent state transition at each layer conceptually takes some duration of time, the discretization timestep $\Delta_t$, determined dynamically in response to the input. Using a naturalistic reading dataset, we show that the per-word timestep from Mamba is a powerful predictor of human reading times, comparable to strong baselines such as word frequency and GPT-2 surprisal and significant even when they are controlled for. We further suggest, through formal analysis of Mamba's architecture and internal dynamics, that Mamba can serve as a new, valuable lens to look at human real-time language processing with ever-updated memory, because it allows us to look at how each module (layer) weighs short- and long-term information retention, and how noise may interact with dynamic, continuous memory representation. Code is available via an (anonymized) link.

Timesteps of Mamba Align with Human Reading Times

GPS trajectories encode rich behavioral information about how people move, organize activities, and form daily routines. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) raise a natural question: can such models infer and summarize travel behavior directly from mobility traces? This paper introduces TravelBehaviorQA, a large-scale benchmark dataset that reframes trajectory analysis as a language-based behavioral understanding task. The dataset links raw GPS trajectories with human-grounded question-answering (QA) pairs that capture travel intensity, temporal structure, activity patterns, mode usage, and behavioral routines. Unlike prior mobility datasets focused on prediction or classification, TravelBehaviorQA emphasizes semantic interpretation through a unified mix of deterministic and open-ended questions. In this benchmark, we construct over 143k QA instances spanning users and years, and evaluate a broad range of state-of-the-art LLMs under controlled settings. Our results reveal substantial gaps between factual extraction and genuine behavioral reasoning, showing that model scale alone is insufficient and that trajectory representation is a primary bottleneck. TravelBehaviorQA exposes critical limitations of current models and establishes a rigorous benchmark for advancing language-based understanding of human mobility behavior.

TravelBehaviorQA: A Benchmark Dataset for Behavioral Interpretation of GPS Trajectories

Self-consistency (SC) is a popular technique for improving the reasoning accuracy of large language models by aggregating multiple sampled outputs, but it comes at a high computational cost due to extensive sampling. We introduce a hybrid ensembling approach that leverages the complementary strengths of two distinct modes of reasoning: Chain-of-Thought (CoT) and Program-of-Thought (PoT). We describe a general framework for combining these two forms of reasoning in self-consistency, as well as particular strategies for both full sampling and early-stopping. We show that CoT-PoT ensembling not only improves overall accuracy, but also drastically reduces the number of samples required for SC by a factor of 9.3x. In particular, the majority of tasks (78.6%) can be addressed with only two samples, which has not been possible with any prior SC methods.

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VocabTailor: Dynamic Vocabulary Selection for Downstream Tasks in Small Language Models

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