Da Chen
2026
Beyond Overlap Metrics: Rewarding Reasoning and Preferences for Faithful Multi-Role Dialogue Summarization
Xiaoyong Mei | Tingting Zuo | Da Chen | Guangyu Hu | Xiangyu Wen | Chao Duan | Mingyan Zhang | Fudan Zheng
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Xiaoyong Mei | Tingting Zuo | Da Chen | Guangyu Hu | Xiangyu Wen | Chao Duan | Mingyan Zhang | Fudan Zheng
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Multi-role dialogue summarization requires modeling complex interactions among multiple speakers while preserving role-specific information and factual consistency. However, most existing methods optimize for automatic metrics such as ROUGE and BERTScore, which favor surface-level imitation of references rather than genuine gains in faithfulness or alignment with human preferences. We propose a novel framework that couples explicit cognitive-style reasoning with reward-based optimization for multi-role dialogue summarization. Our method first distills structured reasoning traces (e.g., step-by-step inferences and intermediate reflections) from a large teacher model and uses them as auxiliary supervision to initialize a reasoning-aware summarizer via staged supervised fine-tuning. It then applies GRPO with a dual-principle reward that blends metric-based signals with human-aligned criteria targeting key information coverage, implicit inference, factual faithfulness, and conciseness. Experiments on multilingual multi-role dialogue benchmarks show that our method matches strong baselines on ROUGE and BERTScore. Specifically, results on CSDS confirm the framework’s stability in semantic consistency, while in-depth analysis on SAMSum demonstrates clear gains in factual faithfulness and model-based preference alignment. These findings underscore the value of reasoning-aware and preference-aware training for reliable dialogue summarization. Code will be made accessible upon acceptance, checkpoints and datasets are now available at https://huggingface.co/NebulaPixel.
2025
ShieldHead: Decoding-time Safeguard for Large Language Models
Zitao Xuan | Xiaofeng Mao | Da Chen | Xin Zhang | Yuhan Dong | Jun Zhou
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Zitao Xuan | Xiaofeng Mao | Da Chen | Xin Zhang | Yuhan Dong | Jun Zhou
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
In light of the widespread deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs), the responsibility for safeguarding and regulating LLM-generated content has taken on heightened significance. Recent advancements in LLM-based moderation methods, e.g., LlamaGuard, have demonstrated remarkable promise in identifying safety risks associated with both inputs and outputs in human-AI interactions. However, integrating LLM-based safeguards into a chatbot system requires an additional inference stage involving a moderation LLM with billions of parameters, which significantly increases computational costs and reduces overall efficiency. In this paper, we demonstrate that simply learning a classification head on the last-layer hidden states of the dialogue model provides a strong capability to identify harmful contents. The classification head, referred to as ShieldHead, serves as an auxiliary branch paralleled with next-token-prediction LM head, enabling the detection of potential risks in past text sequences. Additionally, a label disambiguation technique is employed to supervise ShieldHead with both token-level and sentence-level labels, which further enhances its performance. ShieldHead exhibits remarkable efficiency during inference, providing real-time moderation results alongside token-wise streaming output during the chatbot system’s decoding phase. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed framework: a state-of-the-art performance on the XSTest and SafeRLHF datasets while running at a speed about **300×** faster (**<1ms**) than previous LLM-based moderation models with ** 99%** less parameters of LlamaGuard.