Papers by Pinjia He
Insight Over Sight: Exploring the Vision-Knowledge Conflicts in Multimodal LLMs (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to mitigating vision-knowledge conflict in Large Language Models (MLLMs) are not effective and can be further scaled. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to generate inputs to simulate and evaluate vision-knowledge conflict in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) using original images and 1,122 high-quality question-answer pairs, they propose 'a diagnostic benchmark' |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework, benchmark, and analysis contribute to the understanding and mitigation of vision-knowledge conflicts in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). |
ToolSafety: A Comprehensive Dataset for Enhancing Safety in LLM-Based Agent Tool Invocations (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Current models exhibit notable vulnerabilities in maintaining safety during multi-step tool interactions and in indirect harm scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a safety fine-tuning dataset to fine- tune LLMs into assistants . they propose to use synthesized trajectories and realistic, context-aware sample generation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model maintains safety in multi-step and indirect harm scenarios with little impact on helpfulness. |
Refuse Whenever You Feel Unsafe: Improving Safety in LLMs via Decoupled Refusal Training (2025.acl-long)
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Youliang Yuan, Wenxiang Jiao, Wenxuan Wang, Jen-tse Huang, Jiahao Xu, Tian Liang, Pinjia He, Zhaopeng Tu
| Challenge: | Large Language Models exhibit a level of intelligence that is both impressive and everevolving, but their ability to refuse generating unsafe content is a double-edged sword. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to tackle a refusal position bias within safety tuning data that compromises the models’ ability to appropriately refuse generating unsafe content. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves model safety without compromising performance and surpasses baseline methods in defending against attacks. |
UTBoost: Rigorous Evaluation of Coding Agents on SWE-Bench (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models have enabled the development of coding agents for real-world code generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel LLM-driven test case generator that analyzes codebases and dependencies to generate test cases for real-world Python projects. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the performance of SWE-Bench by analyzing codebases and dependencies. |
Can’t See the Forest for the Trees: Benchmarking Multimodal Safety Awareness for Multimodal LLMs (2025.acl-long)
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Wenxuan Wang, Xiaoyuan Liu, Kuiyi Gao, Jen-tse Huang, Youliang Yuan, Pinjia He, Shuai Wang, Zhaopeng Tu
| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have expanded the capabilities of traditional language models by enabling interaction through both text and images. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal safety awareness benchmark to evaluate MLLMs across 29 safety scenarios with 1,500 carefully curated image-prompt pairs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is able to identify unsafe content and avoid over-sensitivity that can hinder helpfulness. |
SHAPE: Unifying Safety, Helpfulness and Pedagogy for Educational LLMs (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing educational LLMs are vulnerable to pedagogical jailbreaks where students use answer-inducing prompts to elicit solutions rather than scaffolded instructions. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph-augmented tutoring pipeline that infers prerequisite concepts from queries and identifies mastery gaps. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves safety under two pedagogical jailbreak scenarios while maintaining near-ceiling helpfulness under the same evaluation protocol. |
LogicAsker: Evaluating and Improving the Logical Reasoning Ability of Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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Yuxuan Wan, Wenxuan Wang, Yiliu Yang, Youliang Yuan, Jen-tse Huang, Pinjia He, Wenxiang Jiao, Michael Lyu
| Challenge: | LogicAsker examines and improves the reasoning abilities of large language models such as ChatGPT and GPT-4. |
| Approach: | They propose a set of atomic reasoning skills grounded in propositional and predicate logic to examine and improve the reasoning abilities of large language models such as ChatGPT and GPT-4. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves reasoning abilities in large language models such as ChatGPT and GPT-4 by up to 5%. |
Does ChatGPT Know That It Does Not Know? Evaluating the Black-Box Calibration of ChatGPT (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent performance of ChatGPT in downstream tasks is questionable, but does it know that it does not know? |
| Approach: | They propose to use three types of proxy confidence to evaluate ChatGPT's black-box calibration ability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model exhibits a positive correlation with accuracy in TruthfulQA and a negative correlation in the ModAr dataset. |
Curing Miracle Steps in LLM Mathematical Reasoning with Rubric Rewards (2026.acl-long)
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Youliang Yuan, Qiuyang Mang, Jingbang Chen, Hong Wan, Xiaoyuan Liu, Junjielong Xu, Jen-tse Huang, Wenxuan Wang, Wenxiang Jiao, Pinjia He
| Challenge: | Existing models are susceptible to reward hacking, leading to a substantial overestimation of a model's reasoning ability. |
| Approach: | They propose a Rubric Reward Model that rewards the entire reasoning trajectory against problem-specific rubrics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms outcome-only supervision on four math benchmarks and boosts Verified Pass@1024 from 26.7% to 62.6% and reduces the incidence of Miracle Steps by 71%. |
Difficult Task Yes but Simple Task No: Unveiling the Laziness in Multimodal LLMs (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing research indicates that even state-of-the-art MLLMs still suffer from some straightforward visual question-answering (VQA) problems. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a model-based benchmark to investigate model laziness to identify models that err when answering simple visual questions about an image. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model laziness is found to be widespread in current MLLMs, including GPT-4o, Gemini-1.5-pro, Claude 3, LLaVA-1.5, LLva-1.6, and QWen-VL. |