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Nicholas Meade

5 accepted papers

2025

Exploiting Instruction-Following Retrievers for Malicious Information Retrieval

ACL 2025finding

Instruction-following retrievers have been widely adopted alongside LLMs in real-world applications, but little work has investigated the safety risks surrounding their increasing search capabilities. We empirically study the ability of retrievers to satisfy malicious queries, both when used directl…

2025

SafeArena: Evaluating the Safety of Autonomous Web Agents

ICML 2025poster

LLM-based agents are becoming increasingly proficient at solving web-based tasks. With this capability comes a greater risk of misuse for malicious purposes, such as posting misinformation in an online forum or selling illicit substances on a website. To evaluate these risks, we propose SafeArena, a…

Cited by 4SourcePDFScholar
2023

Using In-Context Learning to Improve Dialogue Safety

EMNLP 2023long findings

While large neural-based conversational models have become increasingly proficient dialogue agents, recent work has highlighted safety issues with these systems. For example, these systems can be goaded into generating toxic content, often perpetuating social biases or stereotypes. We investigate a…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2022

An Empirical Survey of the Effectiveness of Debiasing Techniques for Pre-trained Language Models

ACL 2022long

Recent work has shown pre-trained language models capture social biases from the large amounts of text they are trained on. This has attracted attention to developing techniques that mitigate such biases. In this work, we perform an empirical survey of five recently proposed bias mitigation techniqu…

2022

Evaluating the Faithfulness of Importance Measures in NLP by Recursively Masking Allegedly Important Tokens and Retraining

EMNLP 2022finding

To explain NLP models a popular approach is to use importance measures, such as attention, which inform input tokens are important for making a prediction. However, an open question is how well these explanations accurately reflect a model’s logic, a property called faithfulness. To answer this ques…