Papers by Yan Teng
A Mousetrap: Fooling Large Reasoning Models for Jailbreak with Chain of Iterative Chaos (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have advanced beyond traditional Large Language Models, yet they pose heightened safety risks. |
| Approach: | They propose a first jailbreak attack targeting Large Reasoning Models . they exploit a Chaos Machine component to transform attack prompts with diverse one-to-one mappings based on the reasoning chain . |
| Outcome: | The proposed attack exploits the unique vulnerabilities of LRMs by integrating a Chaos Machine. success rates of the mousetrap attack are as high as 96%, 86% and 98% respectively. |
Flames: Benchmarking Value Alignment of LLMs in Chinese (2024.naacl-long)
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Kexin Huang, Xiangyang Liu, Qianyu Guo, Tianxiang Sun, Jiawei Sun, Yaru Wang, Zeyang Zhou, Yixu Wang, Yan Teng, Xipeng Qiu, Yingchun Wang, Dahua Lin
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for large language models (LLMs) do not accurately uncover safety vulnerabilities in LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a value alignment benchmark called Flames that encompasses both harmlessness principles and a unique morality dimension that integrates specific Chinese values such as harmony. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs poorly on Flames, particularly in safety and fairness dimensions. |
Lightweight, Dynamic Graph Convolutional Networks for AMR-to-Text Generation (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | AMR-to-text generation is used to transduce Abstract Meaning Representation structures (AMRs) Graph Convolution Networks (GCNs) are not able to capture non-local information and follow a local (first-order) information aggregation scheme. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic fusion mechanism that captures richer non-local interactions . they propose weight tied convolutions and group graph convolution to reduce memory usage . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on two benchmark datasets with significantly fewer parameters while maintaining the model capacity. |
AgenticEval: Toward Agentic and Self-Evolving Safety Evaluation of Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing static safety evaluation methods are ill-equipped to address dynamic nature of AI risks and evolving regulations, creating a critical safety gap. |
| Approach: | They propose a new paradigm of agentic safety evaluation reframing evaluation as a continuous and self-evolving process rather than a one-time audit. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows a consistent decline in model safety as the evaluation hardens. |
Fake Alignment: Are LLMs Really Aligned Well? (2024.naacl-long)
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Yixu Wang, Yan Teng, Kexin Huang, Chengqi Lyu, Songyang Zhang, Wenwei Zhang, Xingjun Ma, Yu-Gang Jiang, Yu Qiao, Yingchun Wang
| Challenge: | Existing studies on large language models have shown that they are poorly aligned in practice. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to evaluate safety in large language models . they propose two new metrics to quantify fake alignment and obtain corrected performance estimation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework and two metrics show that some models with purported safety are poorly aligned in practice. |
Non-Autoregressive Document-Level Machine Translation (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing non-autoregressive translation models struggle with document context and handling discourse phenomena. |
| Approach: | They propose a simple but effective design of sentence alignment between source and target to improve their performance on document-level machine translation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves high acceleration on documents and sentence alignment significantly enhances their performance. |
CoVerRL: Breaking the Consensus Trap in Label-Free Reasoning via Generator-Verifier Co-Evolution (2026.acl-long)
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Teng Pan, Yuchen Yan, Zixuan Wang, Ruiqing Zhang, Guiyang Hou, Wenqi Zhang, Weiming Lu, Jun Xiao, Yongliang Shen
| Challenge: | Label-free reinforcement learning enables large language models to improve reasoning capabilities . but as training maximizes self-consistency, output diversity collapses, authors say . authors propose a framework where a single model alternates between generator and verifier roles . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework where a model alternates between generator and verifier roles, bootstrapping each other. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that CoVerRL outperforms label-free baselines on reasoning benchmarks . the framework can be used to improve reasoning abilities without ground-truth supervision . |
Probing the Safety Robustness of LLMs in Latent Space (2026.acl-long)
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Tianle Gu, Kexin Huang, Zongqi Wang, Yixu Wang, Jie Li, Xin Wang, Yang Yao, Yujiu Yang, Yan Teng, Yingchun Wang
| Challenge: | Despite substantial progress in safety alignment techniques, aligned large language models can still produce unsafe responses under minor internal perturbations. |
| Approach: | They introduce Activation Steering Attack (ASA) and leverage the Negative Log-Likelihood (NLL) as a diagnostic signal to probe the local sensitivity of safety behaviors in latent space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is model-agnostic and supervision-free, enabling a general and reproducible diagnostic metric for analyzing safety robustness. |
From Evasion to Concealment: Stealthy Knowledge Unlearning for LLMs (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to unlearning often treat nonsensical responses or template-based refusals as the unlearning target, making the process even more vulnerable to attacks and jailbreaks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses inverted facts to remove the need for auxiliary models or retaining data while avoiding leakage. |
| Outcome: | Evaluated on the ToFU Knowledge Unlearning dataset using Llama2-7B-Chat and Phi-1.5, MEOW outperforms baselines in forgetting quality while preserving model utility. |
How Well Do Text Embedding Models Understand Syntax? (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing text embedding models have not addressed syntactic understanding challenges, highlighting ineffectiveness and enhancing generalization ability. |
| Approach: | They propose to examine the ability of text embedding models to generalize across syntactic contexts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models exhibit high similarity socres at this simple task. |
ESC-Eval: Evaluating Emotion Support Conversations in Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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Haiquan Zhao, Lingyu Li, Shisong Chen, Shuqi Kong, Jiaan Wang, Kexin Huang, Tianle Gu, Yixu Wang, Jian Wang, Liang Dandan, Zhixu Li, Yan Teng, Yanghua Xiao, Yingchun Wang
| Challenge: | Emotion Support Conversation (ESC) is a crucial application for reducing stress and providing emotional guidance. |
| Approach: | They re-organize 2,801 role-playing cards to define roles of role-players . they train a specific role- playing model called ESC-Role which behaves more like a confused person than GPT-4 . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model behaves more like a confused person than GPT-4, and the model performs better than GPLs. |