Kexin Huang


2025

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Invisible Entropy: Towards Safe and Efficient Low-Entropy LLM Watermarking
Tianle Gu | Zongqi Wang | Kexin Huang | Yuanqi Yao | Xiangliang Zhang | Yujiu Yang | Xiuying Chen
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Logit-based LLM watermarking traces and verifies AI-generated content by maintaining green and red token lists and increasing the likelihood of green tokens during generation. However, it struggles in low-entropy scenarios, where predictable outputs make green token selection difficult without disrupting natural text flow. Existing approaches address this by assuming access to the original LLM to calculate entropy and selectively watermark high-entropy tokens. However, these methods face two major challenges: (1) high computational costs and detection delays due to reliance on the original LLM, and (2) potential risks of model leakage. To address these limitations, we propose Invisible Entropy (IE), a watermarking paradigm designed to enhance both safety and efficiency. Instead of relying on the original LLM, IE introduces a lightweight feature extractor and an entropy tagger to predict whether the entropy of the next token is high or low. Furthermore, based on theoretical analysis, we developed a threshold navigator that adaptively sets entropy thresholds. It identifies a threshold where the watermark ratio decreases as the green token count increases, enhancing the naturalness of the watermarked text and improving detection robustness. Experiments on HumanEval and MBPP datasets demonstrate that IE reduces parameter size by 99% while achieving performance on par with state-of-the-art methods: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/IE-Official.

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From Evasion to Concealment: Stealthy Knowledge Unlearning for LLMs
Tianle Gu | Kexin Huang | Ruilin Luo | Yuanqi Yao | Xiuying Chen | Yujiu Yang | Yan Teng | Yingchun Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025

LLM Unlearning plays a crucial role in removing sensitive information from language models to mitigate potential misuse. However, previous approaches often treat nonsensical responses or template-based refusals (e.g., “Sorry, I cannot answer.”) as the unlearning target, which can give the impression of deliberate information suppression, making the process even more vulnerable to attacks and jailbreaks. Moreover, most methods rely on auxiliary models or retaining datasets, which adds complexity to the unlearning process. To address these challenges, we propose MEOW, a streamlined and stealthy unlearning method that eliminates the need for auxiliary models or retaining data while avoiding leakage through its innovative use of inverted facts. These inverted facts are generated by an offline LLM and serve as fine-tuning labels. Meanwhile, we introduce MEMO, a novel metric that measures the model’s memorization, to select optimal fine-tuning targets. The use of inverted facts not only maintains the covert nature of the model but also ensures that sensitive information is effectively forgotten without revealing the target data. Evaluated on the ToFU Knowledge Unlearning dataset using Llama2-7B-Chat and Phi-1.5, MEOW outperforms baselines in forgetting quality while preserving model utility. MEOW also maintains strong performance across NLU and NLG tasks and demonstrates superior resilience to attacks, validated via the Min-K% membership inference method.

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LaMP-Val: Large Language Models Empower Personalized Valuation in Auction
Jie Sun | Tianyu Zhang | Houcheng Jiang | Kexin Huang | Xiang Shu | Zhibo Zhu | Lintao Ma | Xingyu Lu | Jun Zhou | Junkang Wu | Chi Luo | An Zhang | Jiancan Wu | Xiang Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025

Auctions are a vital economic mechanism used to determine the market value of goods or services through competitive bidding within a specific framework. However, much of the current research primarily focuses on the bidding algorithms used within auction mechanisms. This often neglects the potential benefits of incorporating individual users’ unique preferences into the valuation process. Our theoretical and empirical analysis demonstrates that valuation errors can significantly impact the overall utility. To bridge this gap, we propose a personalized valuation framework, namely Large Language Models-powered Personalized Valuation (LaMP-Val), which integrates Large Language Models to incorporate personalized semantic preference into users valuation process. LaMP-Val integrating three components: data, learning, and evaluation. The data component tackles the challenge of building a novel dataset specifically for LLMs fine-tuning in personalized valuation modeling. The learning component introduces a diversity template to enhance LLMs’ capacity for modeling fine-grained personal valuation patterns. The evaluation component establishes a closed-loop system where LLM-generated valuations interact with bidding strategies and auction. It proposes two novel metrics to quantify valuation precision and bidding intention accuracy in personalized scenarios. Extensive experiments show that LaMP-Val more accurately captures personalized values and achieves greater profits than baseline approaches.

2024

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ESC-Eval: Evaluating Emotion Support Conversations in Large Language Models
Haiquan Zhao | Lingyu Li | Shisong Chen | Shuqi Kong | Jiaan Wang | Kexin Huang | Tianle Gu | Yixu Wang | Jian Wang | Liang Dandan | Zhixu Li | Yan Teng | Yanghua Xiao | Yingchun Wang
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Emotion Support Conversation (ESC) is a crucial application, which aims to reduce human stress, offer emotional guidance, and ultimately enhance human mental and physical well-being. With the advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs), many researchers have employed LLMs as the ESC models. However, the evaluation of these LLM-based ESCs remains uncertain. In detail, we first re-organize 2,801 role-playing cards from seven existing datasets to define the roles of the role-playing agent. Second, we train a specific role-playing model called ESC-Role which behaves more like a confused person than GPT-4. Third, through ESC-Role and organized role cards, we systematically conduct experiments using 14 LLMs as the ESC models, including general AI-assistant LLMs (e.g., ChatGPT) and ESC-oriented LLMs (e.g., ExTES-Llama). We conduct comprehensive human annotations on interactive multi-turn dialogues of different ESC models. The results show that ESC-oriented LLMs exhibit superior ESC abilities compared to general AI-assistant LLMs, but there is still a gap behind human performance. Moreover, to automate the scoring process for future ESC models, we developed ESC-RANK, which trained on the annotated data, achieving a scoring performance surpassing 35 points of GPT-4.

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Flames: Benchmarking Value Alignment of LLMs in Chinese
Kexin Huang | Xiangyang Liu | Qianyu Guo | Tianxiang Sun | Jiawei Sun | Yaru Wang | Zeyang Zhou | Yixu Wang | Yan Teng | Xipeng Qiu | Yingchun Wang | Dahua Lin
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)

The widespread adoption of large language models (LLMs) across various regions underscores the urgent need to evaluate their alignment with human values. Current benchmarks, however, fall short of effectively uncovering safety vulnerabilities in LLMs. Despite numerous models achieving high scores and ‘topping the chart’ in these evaluations, there is still a significant gap in LLMs’ deeper alignment with human values and achieving genuine harmlessness. To this end, this paper proposes a value alignment benchmark named Flames, which encompasses both common harmlessness principles and a unique morality dimension that integrates specific Chinese values such as harmony. Accordingly, we carefully design adversarial prompts that incorporate complex scenarios and jailbreaking methods, mostly with implicit malice. By prompting 17 mainstream LLMs, we obtain model responses and rigorously annotate them for detailed evaluation. Our findings indicate that all the evaluated LLMs demonstrate relatively poor performance on Flames, particularly in the safety and fairness dimensions. We also develop a lightweight specified scorer capable of scoring LLMs across multiple dimensions to efficiently evaluate new models on the benchmark. The complexity of Flames has far exceeded existing benchmarks, setting a new challenge for contemporary LLMs and highlighting the need for further alignment of LLMs. Our benchmark is publicly available at https://github.com/AIFlames/Flames.

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Fake Alignment: Are LLMs Really Aligned Well?
Yixu Wang | Yan Teng | Kexin Huang | Chengqi Lyu | Songyang Zhang | Wenwei Zhang | Xingjun Ma | Yu-Gang Jiang | Yu Qiao | Yingchun Wang
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)

The growing awareness of safety concerns in large language models (LLMs) has sparked considerable interest in the evaluation of safety. This study investigates an under-explored issue about the evaluation of LLMs, namely the substantial discrepancy in performance between multiple-choice questions and open-ended questions. Inspired by research on jailbreak attack patterns, we argue this is caused by mismatched generalization. That is, LLM only remembers the answer style for open-ended safety questions, which makes it unable to solve other forms of safety tests. We refer to this phenomenon as fake alignment and construct a comparative benchmark to empirically verify its existence in LLMs. We introduce a Fake alIgNment Evaluation (FINE) framework and two novel metrics——Consistency Score (CS) and Consistent Safety Score (CSS), which jointly assess two complementary forms of evaluation to quantify fake alignment and obtain corrected performance estimation. Applying FINE to 14 widely-used LLMs reveals several models with purported safety are poorly aligned in practice. Subsequently, we found that multiple-choice format data can also be used as high-quality contrast distillation-based fine-tuning data, which can strongly improve the alignment consistency of LLMs with minimal fine-tuning overhead. For data and code, see https://github.com/AIFlames/Fake-Alignment.

2020

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Clinical XLNet: Modeling Sequential Clinical Notes and Predicting Prolonged Mechanical Ventilation
Kexin Huang | Abhishek Singh | Sitong Chen | Edward Moseley | Chih-Ying Deng | Naomi George | Charolotta Lindvall
Proceedings of the 3rd Clinical Natural Language Processing Workshop

Clinical notes contain rich information, which is relatively unexploited in predictive modeling compared to structured data. In this work, we developed a new clinical text representation Clinical XLNet that leverages the temporal information of the sequence of the notes. We evaluated our models on prolonged mechanical ventilation prediction problem and our experiments demonstrated that Clinical XLNet outperforms the best baselines consistently. The models and scripts are made publicly available.