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Eric Michael Smith

9 accepted papers

2026

The Alignment Waltz: Jointly Training Agents to Collaborate for Safety

ICLR 2026poster

Harnessing the power of LLMs requires a delicate dance between being helpful and harmless, leading to two critical challenges: vulnerability to adversarial attacks that elicit unsafe content, and a tendency for overrefusal on benign but sensitive prompts. Current approaches often navigate this dance…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Backtracking Improves Generation Safety

ICLR 2025oral

Text generation has a fundamental limitation almost by definition: there is no taking back tokens that have been generated, even when they are clearly problematic. In the context of language model safety, when a partial unsafe generation is produced, language models by their nature tend to happily k…

Cited by 14SourcePDFScholar
2025

Persistent Pre-training Poisoning of LLMs

ICLR 2025poster

Large language models are pre-trained on uncurated text datasets consisting of trillions of tokens scraped from the Web. Prior work has shown that: (1) web-scraped pre-training datasets can be practically poisoned by malicious actors; and (2) adversaries can compromise language models after poisonin…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2023

Multilingual Holistic Bias: Extending Descriptors and Patterns to Unveil Demographic Biases in Languages at Scale

EMNLP 2023long main

We introduce a multilingual extension of the HolisticBias dataset, the largest English template-based taxonomy of textual people references: Multilingual HolisticBias. This extension consists of 20,459 sentences in 50 languages distributed across 13 demographic axes. Source sentences are built from…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

ROBBIE: Robust Bias Evaluation of Large Generative Language Models

EMNLP 2023long main

As generative large language models (LLMs) grow more performant and prevalent, we must develop comprehensive enough tools to measure and improve their fairness. Different prompt-based datasets can be used to measure social bias across multiple text domains and demographic axes, meaning that testing…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Toxicity in Multilingual Machine Translation at Scale

EMNLP 2023long findings

Machine Translation systems can produce different types of errors, some of which are characterized as critical or catastrophic due to the specific negative impact that they can have on users. In this paper we focus on one type of critical error: added toxicity. We evaluate and analyze added toxicity…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2022

Perturbation Augmentation for Fairer NLP

EMNLP 2022main

Unwanted and often harmful social biases are becoming ever more salient in NLP research, affecting both models and datasets. In this work, we ask whether training on demographically perturbed data leads to fairer language models. We collect a large dataset of human annotated text perturbations and t…

2022

“I’m sorry to hear that”: Finding New Biases in Language Models with a Holistic Descriptor Dataset

EMNLP 2022main

As language models grow in popularity, it becomes increasingly important to clearly measure all possible markers of demographic identity in order to avoid perpetuating existing societal harms. Many datasets for measuring bias currently exist, but they are restricted in their coverage of demographic…