Papers by Yulin Hu
OpenPrompt: An Open-source Framework for Prompt-learning (2022.acl-demo)
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| Challenge: | Prompt-learning is a new paradigm in natural language processing, adapting pre-trained language models to cloze-style prediction, autoregressive modeling, or sequence to sequence generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for prompt-learning that integrates pre-trained language models with a unified framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is easy to use and flexible enough to integrate with other frameworks. |
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. |
Exploring Lottery Prompts for Pre-trained Language Models (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to optimize pre-trained language models are expensive and slow to scale. |
| Approach: | They propose to search for instance-level lottery prompts and generalize them to unseen data . they validate the assumption that for every instance, there is almost always a lottery prompt that induces the correct prediction from the PLM . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can achieve comparable results with other gradient-free and optimization-free baselines. |
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. |
When Personalization Legitimizes Risks: Uncovering Safety Vulnerabilities in Personalized Dialogue Agents (2026.acl-long)
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Jiahe Guo, Xiangran Guo, Yulin Hu, Zimo Long, Xingyu Sui, Xuda Zhi, Yongbo Huang, Hao He, Weixiang Zhao, Yanyan Zhao, Bing Qin
| Challenge: | Existing research on personalized LLM agents focuses on the effectiveness of personalized responses. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to quantify intent legitimation in personalized interactions . they propose 'detection-reflection' method that detects intent legititimation from internal representation space . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces safety degradation by using internal representation space. |
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. |
Revisiting Sparse Retrieval for Few-shot Entity Linking (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Entity linking (EL) aims to link ambiguous mentions to their corresponding entities in a knowledge base. |
| Approach: | They propose an ELECTRA-based keyword extractor to denoise the mention context and construct a better query expression. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art models on the ZESHEL dataset by a significant margin. |
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. |
ENPMR-Bench: Benchmarking Proactive Memory Retrieval for Emotional Support Agents (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing research treats memory as a mechanism for factual retention, neglecting its role in shaping users’ emotional experiences. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for evaluating Emotional Need-aware Proactive Memory Retrieval (ENPMR) it enables agents to infer users’ latent emotional needs and proactively retrieve appropriate memories to support empathetic interaction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark includes over 1,800 memory-augmented dialogues and defines structured mappings between emotional needs and supportive memory types. |
A Read-and-Select Framework for Zero-shot Entity Linking (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on the candidate retrieval stage and ignore the essential candidate ranking stage, which disambiguates among entities and makes the final linking prediction. |
| Approach: | They propose a read-and-select framework that models the main components of entity disambiguation . they use mention context to output mention-aware entity representations . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on established zero-shot entity linking dataset ZESHEL with 2.55% micro-average accuracy gain, with no need for laborious multi-phase pre-training used in most of the previous work. |
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. |
ContextLens: Modeling Imperfect Privacy and Safety Context for Legal Compliance (2026.acl-long)
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Haoran Li, Yulin Chen, Huihao Jing, Wenbin Hu, Tsz Ho Li, Chanhou Lou, Hong Ting Tsang, Sirui Han, Yangqiu Song
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to contextualize safety and privacy assessments assume the availability of complete and clear context, whereas real-world contexts tend to be ambiguous and incomplete. |
| Approach: | They propose a semi-rule-based framework that leverages large language models to ground the input context in the legal domain and explicitly identify both known and unknown factors for legal compliance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can significantly improve existing baselines without training and can identify the ambiguous and missing factors. |
Enhancing Chat Language Models by Scaling High-quality Instructional Conversations (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | a recent study validates the effectiveness of chat language models by fine-tuning instruction data. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a large-scale dataset of instructional conversations to fine-tune a conversational model on instruction data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms open-source models in key metrics including scale, average length, diversity, coherence, etc. |
Privacy Checklist: Privacy Violation Detection Grounding on Contextual Integrity Theory (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing privacy studies focus on sub-fields, but they focus on a few sub-domains. |
| Approach: | They propose to use the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 as an example to develop a checklist that covers social identities, private attributes, and existing privacy regulations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed checklist covers social identities, private attributes, and existing privacy regulations. |
TEA-Bench: A Systematic Benchmarking of Tool-enhanced Emotional Support Dialogue Agent (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing ESC systems focus on affective support in text-only settings, ignoring how external tools can enable factual grounding and reduce hallucination in multi-turn emotional support. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for evaluating tool-augmented agents in ESC with realistic emotional scenarios and an MCP-style tool environment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that tool augmentation improves emotional support quality and reduces hallucination, but weaker models benefit only marginally. |
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. |
PrivaCI-Bench: Evaluating Privacy with Contextual Integrity and Legal Compliance (2025.acl-long)
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Haoran Li, Wenbin Hu, Huihao Jing, Yulin Chen, Qi Hu, Sirui Han, Tianshu Chu, Peizhao Hu, Yangqiu Song
| Challenge: | Recent advances in generative large language models (LLMs) have enabled wider applicability, accessibility, and flexibility. |
| Approach: | They propose a contextual privacy evaluation benchmark that covers the entire relevant social context through private information flows. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks cover legal compliance, real court cases, privacy policies, and synthetic data. |