Changick Kim


2026

Financial Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit strong domain expertise but remain vulnerable to financially harmful prompts. To systematically assess this vulnerability, we introduce FinHarmBench, a benchmark designed to evaluate financially harmful and confusable benign prompts. Our analysis reveals a concerning result that financial LLMs can be less robust than general-purpose models, suggesting that domain adaptation alone does not guarantee financial safety alignment. To address this issue, we propose Financial Refusal Steering Distillation (FiRSD), an unsupervised training framework that strengthens financial-domain safety by learning and distilling a financial refusal direction at the representation level. FiRSD enhances refusal behavior without requiring annotated refusal responses. Experiments show that FiRSD substantially improves safety while largely preserving task capability. These results highlight the importance of domain-aware safety alignment for high-stakes financial applications.

2025

Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) demonstrate strong capabilities in visual understanding and description, yet often suffer from hallucinations, attributing incorrect or misleading features to images. We observe that LVLMs disproportionately focus on a small subset of image tokens—termed blind tokens—which are typically irrelevant to the query (e.g., background or non-object regions). We hypothesize that such attention misalignment plays a key role in generating hallucinated responses. To mitigate this issue, we propose Attentional Vision Calibration (AvisC), a test-time approach that dynamically recalibrates the influence of blind tokens without modifying the underlying attention mechanism. AvisC first identifies blind tokens by analyzing layer-wise attention distributions over image tokens, then employs a contrastive decoding strategy to balance the influence of original and blind-token-biased logits. Experiments on standard benchmarks, including POPE, MME, and AMBER, demonstrate that AvisC effectively reduces hallucinations in LVLMs.