Papers by Ting Deng
Beware of Your Po! Measuring and Mitigating AI Safety Risks in Role-Play Fine-Tuning of LLMs (2025.acl-long)
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Weixiang Zhao, Yulin Hu, Yang Deng, Jiahe Guo, Xingyu Sui, Xinyang Han, An Zhang, Yanyan Zhao, Bing Qin, Tat-Seng Chua, Ting Liu
| Challenge: | Existing role-play fine-tuning techniques improve role adaptability but may degrade safety performance, especially for villainous characters. |
| Approach: | They propose safety-aware Role-Play Fine-Tuning (SaRFT) to balance role-playing capabilities and safety. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art baselines under both LoRA and full-parameter fine-tuning settings. |
Lightweight Spatial Modeling for Combinatorial Information Extraction From Documents (2023.findings-eacl)
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Yanfei Dong, Lambert Deng, Jiazheng Zhang, Xiaodong Yu, Ting Lin, Francesco Gelli, Soujanya Poria, Wee Sun Lee
| Challenge: | Existing datasets do not cover documents with complex spatial structures and a lack of spatial information for document entity classification. |
| Approach: | They propose a new spatial bias in attention calculation based on the K-nearest-neighbor graph of document entities that limits entities’ attention to their local radius. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines in most entity types and is highly parameter-efficient compared to existing methods. |
On Safety Risks in Experience-Driven Self-Evolving Agents (2026.findings-acl)
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Weixiang Zhao, Yichen Zhang, Yingshuo Wang, Yang Deng, Yanyan Zhao, Xuda Zhi, Yongbo Huang, Hao He, Wanxiang Che, Bing Qin, Ting Liu
| Challenge: | Experience-driven self-evolution has emerged as a promising paradigm for improving the autonomy of large language model agents, yet its reliance on self-curated experience introduces underexplored safety risks. |
| Approach: | They investigate how experience accumulation and utilization in self-evolving agents affect safety performance across web-based and embodied environments. |
| Outcome: | The findings expose inherent limitations of current self-evolving agents and call for more principled strategies to ensure safe and reliable adaptation. |
MPO: Multilingual Safety Alignment via Reward Gap Optimization (2025.acl-long)
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Weixiang Zhao, Yulin Hu, Yang Deng, Tongtong Wu, Wenxuan Zhang, Jiahe Guo, An Zhang, Yanyan Zhao, Bing Qin, Tat-Seng Chua, Ting Liu
| Challenge: | Existing preference learning methods for safety alignment are monolingual and struggle with noisy multilingual data. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual reward gaP optimization approach that leverages the well-aligned safety capabilities of the dominant language to improve safety alignment across multiple languages. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on three LLMs, LLaMA-3.1, Gemma-2 and Qwen2.5, validate MPO’s efficacy in multilingual safety alignment without degrading general multilingual utility. |
Context Attribution with Multi-Armed Bandit Optimization (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to augmenting attribution with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) focus on training models to explicitly cite context segments during generation, but their reliability remains unverifiable. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that formulates context attribution as a combinatorial multi-armed bandit problem by using Linear Thompson Sampling to efficiently identify the most influential context segments while minimizing the number of model queries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces model queries by 30% while matching or exceeding the attribution quality of existing approaches. |
PromptBERT: Improving BERT Sentence Embeddings with Prompts (2022.emnlp-main)
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Ting Jiang, Jian Jiao, Shaohan Huang, Zihan Zhang, Deqing Wang, Fuzhen Zhuang, Furu Wei, Haizhen Huang, Denvy Deng, Qi Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing research shows that BERT and RoBERTa are poor in sentence embeddings due to static token embeddable bias and ineffective BERT layers. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel contrastive learning method for better sentence embeddings by using a template denoising technique. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 2.29 and 2.58 points of improvement compared to SimCSE and RoBERTa in the unsupervised setting. |
Chain of Strategy Optimization Makes Large Language Models Better Emotional Supporter (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Weixiang Zhao, Xingyu Sui, Xinyang Han, Yang Deng, Yulin Hu, Jiahe Guo, Libo Qin, Qianyun Du, Shijin Wang, Yanyan Zhao, Bing Qin, Ting Liu
| Challenge: | Existing supervised fine-tuning (SFT) fails to address these issues, as it trains models on single gold-standard responses without modeling nuanced strategy trade-offs. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage framework that optimizes strategy selection preferences at each dialogue turn. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves strategy selection preferences at each dialogue turn. |
AdaSteer: Your Aligned LLM is Inherently an Adaptive Jailbreak Defender (2025.emnlp-main)
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Weixiang Zhao, Jiahe Guo, Yulin Hu, Yang Deng, An Zhang, Xingyu Sui, Xinyang Han, Yanyan Zhao, Bing Qin, Tat-Seng Chua, Ting Liu
| Challenge: | Activation steering offers training-free defense but relies on fixed steering coefficients, resulting in suboptimal protection and increased false rejections of benign inputs. |
| Approach: | They propose an adaptive activation steering method that dynamically adjusts model behavior based on input characteristics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline methods across multiple jailbreak attacks with minimal impact on utility. |
Path Spuriousness-aware Reinforcement Learning for Multi-Hop Knowledge Graph Reasoning (2023.eacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Multi-hop reasoning is a common approach for query answering, but can be biased to spurious paths which coincidentally lead to the correct answer with poor explanation. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that quantitatively estimates to what extent a path is spurious by a metric called Path Spuriousness (PS) they propose KG reasoning, which infers new facts along existing paths in KGs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly improves the agent’s ability to prevent spurious paths while keeping comparable to state-of-the-art performance. |
DisCo: Distilled Student Models Co-training for Semi-supervised Text Mining (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing text mining models are fine-tuned by fine-timing a large pre-trained language model (PLM) in downstream tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a semi-supervised learning framework for fine-tuning a cohort of small student models generated from a large pre-trained language model using knowledge distillation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline models on semi-supervised text classification and extractive summarization tasks while maintaining comparable performance. |