Kejiang Chen
2026
Revisiting Entropy Regularization: Adaptive Coefficient Unlocks Its Potential for LLM Reinforcement Learning
Xiaoyun Zhang | Xiaojian Yuan | Di Huang | Wang You | Chen Hu | Jingqing Ruan | Kejiang Chen | Xing Hu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Xiaoyun Zhang | Xiaojian Yuan | Di Huang | Wang You | Chen Hu | Jingqing Ruan | Kejiang Chen | Xing Hu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Reasoning ability has become a defining capability of Large Language Models (LLMs), with Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) emerging as a key paradigm to enhance it. However, RLVR training often suffers from policy entropy collapse, where the policy becomes overly deterministic, hindering exploration and limiting reasoning performance. While entropy regularization is a common remedy, its effectiveness is highly sensitive to the fixed coefficient, making it unstable across tasks and models. In this work, we revisit entropy regularization in RLVR and argue that its potential has been largely underestimated. Our analysis shows that (i) tasks of varying difficulty demand distinct exploration intensities, and (ii) balanced exploration may require the policy entropy to be maintained within a moderate range below its initial level. Therefore, we propose Adaptive Entropy Regularization (AER) — a framework that dynamically balances exploration and exploitation via three components: difficulty-aware coefficient allocation, initial-anchored target entropy, and dynamic global coefficient adjustment. Experiments on multiple mathematical reasoning benchmarks show that AER consistently outperforms baselines, improving both reasoning accuracy and exploration capability. Codes are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/AER-ACL .
Into the Gray Zone: Domain Contexts Can Blur LLM Safety Boundaries
Ki Sen Hung | Xi Yang | Chang Liu | Haoran Li | Kejiang Chen | Changxuan Fan | Tsun On Kwok | Weiming Zhang | Xiaomeng Li | Yangqiu Song
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Ki Sen Hung | Xi Yang | Chang Liu | Haoran Li | Kejiang Chen | Changxuan Fan | Tsun On Kwok | Weiming Zhang | Xiaomeng Li | Yangqiu Song
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
A central goal of LLM alignment is to balance helpfulness with harmlessness, yet these objectives conflict when the same knowledge serves both legitimate and malicious purposes. This tension is amplified by context-sensitive alignment: we observe that domain-specific contexts (e.g., chemistry) selectively relax defenses for domain-relevant harmful knowledge, while safety-research contexts (e.g., jailbreak studies) trigger broader relaxation spanning all harm categories. To systematically exploit this vulnerability, we propose Jargon, a framework combining safety-research contexts with multi-turn adversarial interactions that achieves attack success rates exceeding 93% across seven frontier models, including GPT-5.2, Claude-4.5, and Gemini-3, substantially outperforming existing methods. Activation space analysis reveals that Jargon queries occupy an intermediate region between benign and harmful inputs, a gray zone where refusal decisions become unreliable. To mitigate this vulnerability, we design a policy-guided safeguard that steers models toward helpful yet harmless responses, and internalize this capability through alignment fine-tuning, reducing attack success rates while preserving helpfulness.
2025
SQL Injection Jailbreak: A Structural Disaster of Large Language Models
Jiawei Zhao | Kejiang Chen | Weiming Zhang | Nenghai Yu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Jiawei Zhao | Kejiang Chen | Weiming Zhang | Nenghai Yu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Large Language Models (LLMs) are susceptible to jailbreak attacks that can induce them to generate harmful content.Previous jailbreak methods primarily exploited the internal properties or capabilities of LLMs, such as optimization-based jailbreak methods and methods that leveraged the model’s context-learning abilities. In this paper, we introduce a novel jailbreak method, SQL Injection Jailbreak (SIJ), which targets the external properties of LLMs, specifically, the way LLMs construct input prompts. By injecting jailbreak information into user prompts, SIJ successfully induces the model to output harmful content. For open-source models, SIJ achieves near 100% attack success rates on five well-known LLMs on the AdvBench and HEx-PHI, while incurring lower time costs compared to previous methods. For closed-source models, SIJ achieves an average attack success rate over 85% across five models in the GPT and Doubao series. Additionally, SIJ exposes a new vulnerability in LLMs that urgently requires mitigation. To address this, we propose a simple adaptive defense method called Self-Reminder-Key to counter SIJ and demonstrate its effectiveness through experimental results. Our code is available at https://github.com/weiyezhimeng/SQL-Injection-Jailbreak.
EvoBench: Towards Real-world LLM-Generated Text Detection Benchmarking for Evolving Large Language Models
Xiao Yu | Yi Yu | Dongrui Liu | Kejiang Chen | Weiming Zhang | Nenghai Yu | Jing Shao
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Xiao Yu | Yi Yu | Dongrui Liu | Kejiang Chen | Weiming Zhang | Nenghai Yu | Jing Shao
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
With the widespread of Large Language Models (LLMs), there has been an increasing need to detect LLM-generated texts, prompting extensive research in this area. However, existing detection methods mainly evaluate on static benchmarks, which neglect the evolving nature of LLMs. Relying on existing static benchmarks could create a misleading sense of security, overestimating the real-world effectiveness of detection methods.To bridge this gap, we introduce EvoBench, a dynamic benchmark considering a new dimension of generalization across continuously evolving LLMs.EvoBench categorizes the evolving LLMs into (1) updates over time and (2) developments like finetuning and pruning, covering 7 LLM families and their 29 evolving versions. To measure the generalization across evolving LLMs, we introduce a new EMG (Evolving Model Generalization) metric. Our evaluation of 14 detection methods on EvoBench reveals that they all struggle to maintain generalization when confronted with evolving LLMs. To mitigate the generalization problems, we further propose improvement strategies. For zero-shot detectors, we propose pruning the scoring model to extract shared features. For supervised detectors, we also propose a practical training strategy.Our research sheds light on critical challenges in real-world LLM-generated text detection and represents a significant step toward practical applications.
On the Vulnerability of Text Sanitization
Meng Tong | Kejiang Chen | Xiaojian Yuan | Jiayang Liu | Weiming Zhang | Nenghai Yu | Jie Zhang
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Meng Tong | Kejiang Chen | Xiaojian Yuan | Jiayang Liu | Weiming Zhang | Nenghai Yu | Jie Zhang
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Text sanitization, which employs differential privacy to replace sensitive tokens with new ones, represents a significant technique for privacy protection. Typically, its performance in preserving privacy is evaluated by measuring the attack success rate (ASR) of reconstruction attacks, where attackers attempt to recover the original tokens from the sanitized ones. However, current reconstruction attacks on text sanitization are developed empirically, making it challenging to accurately assess the effectiveness of sanitization. In this paper, we aim to provide a more accurate evaluation of sanitization effectiveness. Inspired by the works of Palamidessi et al., we implement theoretically optimal reconstruction attacks targeting text sanitization. We derive their bounds on ASR as benchmarks for evaluating sanitization performance. For real-world applications, we propose two practical reconstruction attacks based on these theoretical findings. Our experimental results underscore the necessity of reassessing these overlooked risks. Notably, one of our attacks achieves a 46.4% improvement in ASR over the state-of-the-art baseline, with a privacy budget of 𝜖=4.0 on the SST-2 dataset. Our code is available at: https://github.com/mengtong0110/On-the-Vulnerability-of-Text-Sanitization.
2024
Text Fluoroscopy: Detecting LLM-Generated Text through Intrinsic Features
Xiao Yu | Kejiang Chen | Qi Yang | Weiming Zhang | Nenghai Yu
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Xiao Yu | Kejiang Chen | Qi Yang | Weiming Zhang | Nenghai Yu
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the domain of natural language processing because of their excellent performance on various tasks. Despite their impressive capabilities, LLMs also have the potential to generate texts that pose risks of misuse. Consequently, detecting LLM-generated text has become increasingly important.Previous LLM-generated text detection methods use semantic features, which are stored in the last layer. This leads to methods that overfit the training set domain and exhibit shortcomings in generalization. Therefore, We argue that utilizing intrinsic features rather than semantic features for detection results in better performance.In this work, we design Text Fluoroscopy, a black-box method with better generalizability for detecting LLM-generated text by mining the intrinsic features of the text to be detected. Our method captures the text’s intrinsic features by identifying the layer with the largest distribution difference from the last and first layers when projected to the vocabulary space.Our method achieves 7.36% and 2.84% average improvement in detection performance compared to the baselines in detecting texts from different domains generated by GPT-4 and Claude3, respectively.