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Weixiang Zhao

24 accepted papers

2026

AlphaSteer: Learning Refusal Steering with Principled Null-Space Constraint

ICLR 2026poster

As LLMs are increasingly deployed in real-world applications, ensuring their ability to refuse malicious prompts, especially jailbreak attacks, is essential for safe and reliable use. Recently, activation steering has emerged as an effective approach for enhancing LLM safety by adding a refusal dire…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

CultureRL: Internalizing Cultural Principles in Large Language Models via Norm-Driven Reinforcement Learning

AAAI 2026technical

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed across culturally diverse regions, ensuring that their responses align with users’ cultural norms has become a critical challenge. Existing approaches to cultural alignment primarily rely on prompting or data-augmentation-based supervised fin

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

Large Language Model Agents Are Not Always Faithful Self-Evolvers

ICML 2026poster

Self-evolving large language model (LLM) agents continually improve by accumulating and reusing past experience, yet it remains unclear whether they faithfully rely on that experience to guide their behavior. We present the first systematic investigation of \emph{experience faithfulness}—the causal …

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Towards Comprehensive Post Safety Alignment of Large Language Models via Safety Patching

IJCAI 2026

Safety alignment of large language models (LLMs) has been gaining increasing attention. However, current safety-aligned LLMs suffer from the fragile and imbalanced safety mechanisms, which can still be induced to generate unsafe responses, exhibit over-safety by rejecting safe user inputs, and fail

Cited by 0Scholar
2026

Who Transfers Safety? Identifying and Targeting Cross-Lingual Shared Safety Neurons

ICML 2026poster

Multilingual safety remains significantly imbalanced, leaving non-high-resource (NHR) languages vulnerable compared to robust high-resource (HR) ones. Moreover, the neural mechanisms driving safety alignment remain unclear despite observed cross-lingual representation transfer.In this paper, we find…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

AdaSteer: Your Aligned LLM is Inherently an Adaptive Jailbreak Defender

EMNLP 2025

Despite extensive efforts in safety alignment, large language models (LLMs) remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks. Activation steering offers a training-free defense method but relies on fixed steering coefficients, resulting in suboptimal protection and increased false rejections of benign inputs.

2025

Beware of Your Po! Measuring and Mitigating AI Safety Risks in Role-Play Fine-Tuning of LLMs

ACL 2025long

Role-playing enables large language models (LLMs) to engage users in immersive and personalized interactions, but it also introduces significant safety risks. Existing role-play fine-tuning techniques improve role adaptability but may degrade safety performance, particularly for villainous character…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Chain of Strategy Optimization Makes Large Language Models Better Emotional Supporter

EMNLP 2025

The growing emotional stress in modern society has increased the demand for Emotional Support Conversations (ESC). While Large Language Models (LLMs) show promise for ESC, they face two key challenges: (1) low strategy selection accuracy, and (2) preference bias, limiting their adaptability to users

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

INN-based Secure Steganography Using Lost Information as Adversarial Perturbations

ICASSP 2025accepted

Recently image steganography methods based on invertible neural networks (INNs) demonstrated the capability to automatically embed and extract secret messages while maintaining high visual quality in stego images. However, there remain concerns about security and invertibility of such methods. In th…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

L-MTP: Leap Multi-Token Prediction Beyond Adjacent Context for Large Language Models

NeurIPS 2025poster

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved notable progress. Despite their success, next-token prediction (NTP), the dominant method for LLM training and inference, is constrained in both contextual coverage and inference efficiency due to its inherently sequential process. To overcome these challen…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

MPO: Multilingual Safety Alignment via Reward Gap Optimization

ACL 2025long

Large language models (LLMs) have become increasingly central to AI applications worldwide, necessitating robust multilingual safety alignment to ensure secure deployment across diverse linguistic contexts. Existing preference learning methods for safety alignment, such as RLHF and DPO, are primaril…

2025

On Reasoning Strength Planning in Large Reasoning Models

NeurIPS 2025poster

Recent studies empirically reveal that large reasoning models (LRMs) can automatically allocate more reasoning strengths (\ie the number of reasoning tokens) for harder problems, exhibiting difficulty-awareness for better task performance. While this automatic reasoning strength allocation phenomeno…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

RSafe: Incentivizing proactive reasoning to build robust and adaptive LLM safeguards

NeurIPS 2025poster

Large Language Models (LLMs) continue to exhibit vulnerabilities despite deliberate safety alignment efforts, posing significant risks to users and society. To safeguard against the risk of policy-violating content, system-level moderation via external guard models—designed to monitor LLM inputs and…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Teaching Language Models to Evolve with Users: Dynamic Profile Modeling for Personalized Alignment

NeurIPS 2025poster

Personalized alignment is essential for enabling large language models (LLMs) to engage effectively in user-centric dialogue. While recent prompt-based and offline optimization methods offer preliminary solutions, they fall short in cold-start scenarios and long-term personalization due to their inh…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

When Less Language is More: Language-Reasoning Disentanglement Makes LLMs Better Multilingual Reasoners

NeurIPS 2025spotlight

Multilingual reasoning remains a significant challenge for large language models (LLMs), with performance disproportionately favoring high-resource languages. Drawing inspiration from cognitive neuroscience, which suggests that human reasoning functions largely independently of language processing,…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

Both Matter: Enhancing the Emotional Intelligence of Large Language Models without Compromising the General Intelligence

ACL 2024findings

Emotional Intelligence (EI), consisting of emotion perception, emotion cognition and emotion expression, plays the critical roles in improving user interaction experience for the current large language model (LLM) based conversational general AI assistants. Previous works mainly focus on raising the…

2024

SAPT: A Shared Attention Framework for Parameter-Efficient Continual Learning of Large Language Models

ACL 2024long

The continual learning (CL) ability is vital for deploying large language models (LLMs) in the dynamic world. Existing methods devise the learning module to acquire task-specific knowledge with parameter-efficient tuning (PET) block and the selection module to pick out the corresponding one for the…

Cited by 21SourcePDFScholar
2023

A Topic-Enhanced Approach for Emotion Distribution Forecasting in Conversations

ICASSP 2023accepted

Emotion Forecasting in Conversations (EFC), the task aims to predict the emotion of next utterance (yet to come), has received more and more attention in recent years. However, this task ignores the one-to-many feature of dialogue and its prediction target is emotion label, which is flawed in most c…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Don’t Lose Yourself! Empathetic Response Generation via Explicit Self-Other Awareness

ACL 2023findings

As a critical step to achieve human-like chatbots, empathetic response generation has attained increasing interests. Previous attempts are incomplete and not sufficient enough to elicit empathy because they only stay on the initial stage of empathy to automatically sense and simulate the feelings an…

2023

Knowledge-Bridged Causal Interaction Network for Causal Emotion Entailment

AAAI 2023technical

Causal Emotion Entailment aims to identify causal utterances that are responsible for the target utterance with a non-neutral emotion in conversations. Previous works are limited in thorough understanding of the conversational context and accurate reasoning of the emotion cause. To this end, we prop…

2023

TransESC: Smoothing Emotional Support Conversation via Turn-Level State Transition

ACL 2023findings

Emotion Support Conversation (ESC) is an emerging and challenging task with the goal of reducing the emotional distress of people. Previous attempts fail to maintain smooth transitions between utterances in ESC because they ignoring to grasp the fine-grained transition information at each dialogue t…

2022

CauAIN: Causal Aware Interaction Network for Emotion Recognition in Conversations

IJCAI 2022poster

Emotion Recognition in Conversations has attained increasing interest in the natural language processing community. Many neural-network based approaches endeavor to solve the challenge of emotional dynamics in conversations and gain appealing results. However, these works are limited in capturing de…

Cited by 72SourcePDFScholar
2022

MuCDN: Mutual Conversational Detachment Network for Emotion Recognition in Multi-Party Conversations

COLING 2022main

As an emerging research topic in natural language processing community, emotion recognition in multi-party conversations has attained increasing interest. Previous approaches that focus either on dyadic or multi-party scenarios exert much effort to cope with the challenge of emotional dynamics and a…