Abstract
Large language models increasingly require structured inference, from enforcing JSON schema to multilingual parsing, where outputs must satisfy complex constraints. We introduce MetaJuLS, a meta-reinforcement learning approach that learns universal constraint propagation policies applicable across languages and tasks without task-specific retraining. By formulating structured inference as adaptive constraint propagation and training a Graph Attention Network with meta-learning, MetaJuLS achieves 1.5-2.0× speedups over GPU-optimized baselines while maintaining an accuracy within 0.2% of that of state-of-the-art parsers. On Universal Dependencies across 10 languages and LLM-constrained generation (LogicBench, GSM8K-Constrained), MetaJuLS demonstrates rapid cross-domain adaptation: a policy trained on English parsing adapts to new languages and tasks with 5–10 gradient steps (5–15 seconds) rather than requiring hours of task-specific training. Mechanistic analysis reveals that the policy employs human-like parsing strategies (easy-first) and novel, non-intuitive heuristics. By reducing the number of propagation steps in LLM deployments, MetaJuLS contributes to Green AI by directly reducing the inference carbon footprint.
- Anthology ID:
- 2026.acl-long.701
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
- Month:
- July
- Year:
- 2026
- Address:
- San Diego, California, United States
- Editors:
- Maria Liakata, Viviane P. Moreira, Jiajun Zhang, David Jurgens
- Venue:
- ACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 15351–15368
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.701/
- DOI:
- Bibkey:
- Cite (ACL):
- Ibne Farabi Shihab, Sanjeda Akter, and Anuj Sharma. 2026. Adaptive Constraint Propagation: Scaling Structured Inference for Large Language Models via Meta-Reinforcement Learning. In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 15351–15368, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Adaptive Constraint Propagation: Scaling Structured Inference for Large Language Models via Meta-Reinforcement Learning (Shihab et al., ACL 2026)
- Copy Citation:
- PDF:
- https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.701.pdf
- Checklist:
- 2026.acl-long.701.checklist.pdf


























