Papers by Mingqian Zheng
Let Them Down Easy! Contextual Effects of LLM Guardrails on User Perceptions and Preferences (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Mingqian Zheng, Wenjia Hu, Patrick Zhao, Motahhare Eslami, Jena D. Hwang, Faeze Brahman, Carolyn Rose, Maarten Sap
| Challenge: | Current LLMs are trained to refuse potentially harmful input queries regardless of intent . a study of 480 participants evaluating 3,840 query-response pairs reveals that response strategy largely shapes user experience . |
| Approach: | They examine how different refusal strategies affect user perceptions across varying motivations . they find partial compliance reduces negative user perception by over 50% to flat-out refusals a 480 participants study . |
| Outcome: | The study examines the perceptions of LLMs on user intents and their response strategies . it shows that partial compliance reduces negative user perceptions by over 50% to flat refusals . |
Imperfectly Cooperative Human-AI Interactions: Comparing the Impacts of Human and AI Attributes in Simulated and User Studies (2026.findings-acl)
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Myke C. Cohen, Mingqian Zheng, Neel Bhandari, Hsien-Te Kao, Xuhui Zhou, Daniel Nguyen, Laura Cassani, Maarten Sap, Svitlana Volkova
| Challenge: | In simulations, personality traits and AI attributes were comparatively influential, but with actual human subjects, AI attributes – particularly transparency – were much more impactful. |
| Approach: | They compare a purely simulated dataset and a parallel human subjects experiment to examine how human personality traits and AI design characteristics jointly shape interaction outcomes in imperfectly cooperative scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The results show that personality traits and AI attributes are comparatively influential in simulations, but with actual human subjects, they are much more impactful. |
Synthetic Socratic Debates: Examining Persona Effects on Moral Decision and Persuasion Dynamics (2025.emnlp-main)
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Jiarui Liu, Yueqi Song, Yunze Xiao, Mingqian Zheng, Lindia Tjuatja, Jana Schaich Borg, Mona T. Diab, Maarten Sap
| Challenge: | a study of multi-dimensional persona effects in AI-AI debates shows that personas influence moral stances and debate outcomes . political ideology and personality traits exert the strongest influence, according to our study . |
| Approach: | They propose to use a 6-dimensional persona space to simulate structured debates . they find political ideology and personality traits exert the strongest influence . |
| Outcome: | The study shows that personas affect moral stances and debate outcomes . political ideology and personality traits exert the strongest influence . |
When ”A Helpful Assistant” Is Not Really Helpful: Personas in System Prompts Do Not Improve Performances of Large Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Commercial AI systems often define the role of the LLM in system prompts. |
| Approach: | They conduct a systematic evaluation of personas in system prompts by adding 162 roles covering 6 types of interpersonal relationships and 8 domains of expertise. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model does not improve performance in the system prompt setting where no persona is added. |
Causally Modeling the Linguistic and Social Factors that Predict Email Response (2025.naacl-long)
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Yinuo Xu, Hong Chen, Sushrita Rakshit, Aparna Ananthasubramaniam, Omkar Yadav, Mingqian Zheng, Michael Jiang, Lechen Zhang, Bowen Yi, Kenan Alkiek, Abraham Israeli, Bangzhao Shu, Hua Shen, Jiaxin Pei, Haotian Zhang, Miriam Schirmer, David Jurgens
| Challenge: | a key intent behind many emails is to get a reply from the recipient. |
| Approach: | They propose to model the intents, expectations, and responsiveness in email exchanges by using a dataset containing 1800 emails annotated with nuanced types of intents and expectations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on 1800 emails annotated with nuanced types of intents and expectations . it shows that social status, argumentation, and strength of social connection influence email response rates . |