Mengdi Li


2025

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Fraud-R1 : A Multi-Round Benchmark for Assessing the Robustness of LLM Against Augmented Fraud and Phishing Inducements
Shu Yang | Shenzhe Zhu | Zeyu Wu | Keyu Wang | Junchi Yao | Junchao Wu | Lijie Hu | Mengdi Li | Derek F. Wong | Di Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025

With the increasing integration of large language models (LLMs) into real-world applications such as finance, e-commerce, and recommendation systems, their susceptibility to misinformation and adversarial manipulation poses significant risks. Existing fraud detection benchmarks primarily focus on single-turn classification tasks, failing to capture the dynamic nature of real-world fraud attempts. To address this gap, we introduce Fraud-R1, a challenging bilingual benchmark designed to assess LLMs’ ability to resist fraud and phishing attacks across five key fraud categories: Fraudulent Services, Impersonation, Phishing Scams, Fake Job Postings, and Online Relationships, covering subclasses. Our dataset comprises manually curated fraud cases from social media, news, phishing scam records, and prior fraud datasets.

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Understanding the Repeat Curse in Large Language Models from a Feature Perspective
Junchi Yao | Shu Yang | Jianhua Xu | Lijie Hu | Mengdi Li | Di Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025

Large language models (LLMs) have made remarkable progress in various domains, yet they often suffer from repetitive text generation, a phenomenon we refer to as the ”Repeat Curse”. While previous studies have proposed decoding strategies to mitigate repetition, the underlying mechanism behind this issue remains insufficiently explored. In this work, we investigate the root causes of repetition in LLMs through the lens of mechanistic interpretability. Inspired by recent advances in Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs), which enable monosemantic feature extraction, we propose a novel approach—”Duplicatus Charm”—to induce and analyze the Repeat Curse. Our method systematically identifies “Repetition Features” -the key model activations responsible for generating repetitive outputs. First, we locate the layers most involved in repetition through logit analysis. Next, we extract and stimulate relevant features using SAE-based activation manipulation. To validate our approach, we construct a repetition dataset covering token and paragraph level repetitions and introduce an evaluation pipeline to quantify the influence of identified repetition features. Furthermore, by deactivating these features, we have effectively mitigated the Repeat Curse.

2024

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Enhancing Zero-Shot Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Large Language Models through Logic
Xufeng Zhao | Mengdi Li | Wenhao Lu | Cornelius Weber | Jae Hee Lee | Kun Chu | Stefan Wermter
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)

Recent advancements in large language models have showcased their remarkable generalizability across various domains. However, their reasoning abilities still have significant room for improvement, especially when confronted with scenarios requiring multi-step reasoning. Although large language models possess extensive knowledge, their reasoning often fails to effectively utilize this knowledge to establish a coherent thinking paradigm. These models sometimes show hallucinations as their reasoning procedures are unconstrained by logical principles. Aiming at improving the zero-shot chain-of-thought reasoning ability of large language models, we propose LoT (Logical Thoughts), a self-improvement prompting framework that leverages principles rooted in symbolic logic, particularly Reductio ad Absurdum, to systematically verify and rectify the reasoning processes step by step. Experimental evaluations conducted on language tasks in diverse domains, including arithmetic, commonsense, symbolic, causal inference, and social problems, demonstrate the efficacy of enhanced reasoning by logic. The implementation code for LoT can be accessed at: https://github.com/xf-zhao/LoT.