← Search

Charith Peris

10 accepted papers

2026

Adversarial Déjà Vu: Jailbreak Dictionary Learning for Stronger Generalization to Unseen Attacks

ICLR 2026poster

Large language models remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks that bypass safety guardrails to elicit harmful outputs. Defending against novel jailbreaks represents a critical challenge in AI safety. Adversarial training---designed to make models robust against worst-case perturbations---has been the…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Controlling the Risk of Corrupted Contexts for Language Models via Early-Exiting

ICML 2026poster

Large language models (LLMs) can be influenced by harmful or irrelevant context, which can significantly harm model performance on downstream tasks. This motivates principled designs in which LLM systems include built-in mechanisms to guard against such "garbage in, garbage out" scenarios. We propos…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Towards Safety Reasoning in LLMs: AI-agentic Deliberation for Policy-embedded CoT Data Creation

ACL 2025finding

Safety reasoning is a recent paradigm where LLMs reason over safety policies before generating responses, thereby mitigating limitations in existing safety measures such as over-refusal and jailbreak vulnerabilities. However, implementing this paradigm is challenging due to the resource-intensive pr…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

Attribute Controlled Fine-tuning for Large Language Models: A Case Study on Detoxification

EMNLP 2024finding

We propose a constraint learning schema forfine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs)with attribute control. Given a training corpusand control criteria formulated as a sequence-level constraint on model outputs, our methodfine-tunes the LLM on the training corpus whileenhancing constraint satisfactio…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

Evaluating Differentially Private Synthetic Data Generation in High-Stakes Domains

EMNLP 2024finding

The difficulty of anonymizing text data hinders the development and deployment of NLP in high-stakes domains that involve private data, such as healthcare and social services. Poorly anonymized sensitive data cannot be easily shared with annotators or external researchers, nor can it be used to trai…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2024

The steerability of large language models toward data-driven personas

NAACL 2024long

Large language models (LLMs) are known to generate biased responses where the opinions of certain groups and populations are underrepresented. Here, we present a novel approach to achieve controllable generation of specific viewpoints using LLMs, that can be leveraged to produce multiple perspective…

Cited by 26SourcePDFScholar
2024

Tree-of-Traversals: A Zero-Shot Reasoning Algorithm for Augmenting Black-box Language Models with Knowledge Graphs

ACL 2024long

Knowledge graphs (KGs) complement Large Language Models (LLMs) by providing reliable, structured, domain-specific, and up-to-date external knowledge. However, KGs and LLMs are often developed separately and must be integrated after training. We introduce Tree-of-Traversals, a novel zero-shot reasoni…

2023

Controlling the Extraction of Memorized Data from Large Language Models via Prompt-Tuning

ACL 2023short

Large Language Models (LLMs) are known to memorize significant portions of their training data. Parts of this memorized content have been shown to be extractable by simply querying the model, which poses a privacy risk. We present a novel approach which uses prompt-tuning to control the extraction r…

2023

MASSIVE: A 1M-Example Multilingual Natural Language Understanding Dataset with 51 Typologically-Diverse Languages

ACL 2023long

We present the MASSIVE dataset–Multilingual Amazon Slu resource package (SLURP) for Slot-filling, Intent classification, and Virtual assistant Evaluation. MASSIVE contains 1M realistic, parallel, labeled virtual assistant utterances spanning 51 languages, 18 domains, 60 intents, and 55 slots. MASSIV…

2022

Knowledge Distillation Transfer Sets and their Impact on Downstream NLU Tasks

EMNLP 2022industry

Teacher-student knowledge distillation is a popular technique for compressing today’s prevailing large language models into manageable sizes that fit low-latency downstream applications. Both the teacher and the choice of transfer set used for distillation are crucial ingredients in creating a high…

Cited by 5SourcePDFScholar