Papers by Yanyan Yang
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. |
ChemReason-Bench: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Procedural Reasoning in Experimental Chemistry (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Experimental protocols in organic synthesis specify not only the intended transformation, but also an executable sequence of operations and conditions. |
| Approach: | They propose a human-validated benchmark for verifiable experimental procedure reasoning . they instantiate 7306 benchmark tasks across six complementary formats . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that the evaluations are less diagnostic of procedure-level decision making. |
An Iterative Emotion Interaction Network for Emotion Recognition in Conversations (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Emotion recognition in conversations (ERC) is a task that aims to recognize the emotion of each utterance in conversations. |
| Approach: | They propose an iterative emotion interaction network which uses iterativly predicted emotion labels instead of gold emotion labels to explicitly model the emotion interaction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method retains state-of-the-art performance on two datasets and achieves high accuracy. |
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. |
Both Matter: Enhancing the Emotional Intelligence of Large Language Models without Compromising the General Intelligence (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Emotional Intelligence (EI) is a key concept in the field of human intelligence. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to enhance EI of large language models by naive fine-tuning on EI-related tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves EI of two LLM-based assistants without compromising GI. |
Sentiment Word Aware Multimodal Refinement for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis with ASR Errors (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for multimodal sentiment analysis are limited in their capacity to be deployed in the real world. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that can dynamically refine erroneous sentiment words by leveraging multimodal sentiment clues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model surpasses the state-of-the-art models on three datasets. |
Face-Sensitive Image-to-Emotional-Text Cross-modal Translation for Multimodal Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models focus on utilizing semantic information in the image but ignore using visual emotional cues. |
| Approach: | They propose a face-sensitive image-to-emotional-text translation method that captures visual emotional cues through facial expressions and selectively matches and fuses with the textual content. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results on the Twitter-2015 and Twitter-2017 datasets. |
Can Large Language Models Understand You Better? An MBTI Personality Detection Dataset Aligned with Population Traits (2025.coling-main)
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Bohan Li, Jiannan Guan, Longxu Dou, Yunlong Feng, Dingzirui Wang, Yang Xu, Enbo Wang, Qiguang Chen, Bichen Wang, Xiao Xu, Yimeng Zhang, Libo Qin, Yanyan Zhao, Qingfu Zhu, Wanxiang Che
| Challenge: | Existing data on MBTI personality detection are based on self-reported labels and fail to capture the full range of population personality traits. |
| Approach: | They construct a manually annotated MBTI personality detection dataset with soft labels under the guidance of psychologists and use them to identify the task. |
| Outcome: | The MBTIBench is the first manually annotated MBti personality detection dataset with soft labels under the guidance of psychologists. |
A Text-Centered Shared-Private Framework via Cross-Modal Prediction for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies treat all three modal features equally and implicitly explore the interactions between different modalities. |
| Approach: | They propose a text-centered shared-private framework for multimodal fusion . they propose modalities that can provide shared and private semantics . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on the MOSEI and MOSI datasets. |
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. |
Look Beyond Feeling: Unveiling Latent Needs from Implicit Expressions for Proactive Emotional Support (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are gaining popularity as scalable tools for mental health support . however, nearly half of individuals do not receive timely support due to limited selfawareness or reluctance to seek help. |
| Approach: | They propose a proactive emotional support framework that leverages principles of active listening to uncover implicit user needs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model elicits implicit emotional needs and delivers empathetic support compared to baselines . |
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. |
End-to-End Learnable Psychiatric Scale Guided Risky Post Screening for Depression Detection on Social Media (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to detect depression from social media posting history are limited by frozen screening models and lack of learning. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a frozen screening model to train a risky post detection model with psychiatric scales to enable a learnable end-to-end learning process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms several strong baseline methods and qualitative analysis confirms that it better captures users’ mental states than others. |
Improving Chinese Spelling Check by Character Pronunciation Prediction: The Effects of Adaptivity and Granularity (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Chinese spelling check (CSC) is a fundamental NLP task that detects and corrects spelling errors in Chinese texts. |
| Approach: | They propose an auxiliary task of Chinese pronunciation prediction to improve CSC . they propose adaptive weighting schemes and a delicate correction strategy . |
| Outcome: | The proposed auxiliary task improves Chinese pronunciation prediction on three benchmarks. |
Aligning Cross-Lingual Entities with Multi-Aspect Information (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge graphs that represent entities in different languages are not covered by existing systems. |
| Approach: | They propose two ways to embed entities from multilingual knowledge graphs into the same vector space, where equivalent entities are close to each other. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly outperforms existing systems on two benchmark datasets. |
ChemActor: Enhancing Automated Extraction of Chemical Synthesis Actions with LLM-Generated Data (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for extracting chemical procedures from literature are insufficient and low-quality due to the inherent ambiguity of chemical language and the high cost of human annotation. |
| Approach: | They propose a fully fine-tuned large language model (LLM) as a chemical executor to convert between unstructured experimental procedures and structured action sequences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the baseline model on R2D and D2A tasks by 10%. |
SAPT: A Shared Attention Framework for Parameter-Efficient Continual Learning of Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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Weixiang Zhao, Shilong Wang, Yulin Hu, Yanyan Zhao, Bing Qin, Xuanyu Zhang, Qing Yang, Dongliang Xu, Wanxiang Che
| Challenge: | Existing methods to address catastrophic forgetting and knowledge transfer in large language models (LLMs) ignore potential of aligning the two modules to effectively address catastrophic forgetting and knowledge transfers simultaneously. |
| Approach: | They propose a Shared Attentive Learning & Selection module to align the PET learning and selection modules to address catastrophic forgetting and knowledge transfer simultaneously. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on two CL benchmarks show that the proposed framework is superior when scaled to different model sizes, different model architectures and unseen tasks. |