Lang Gao
2026
When Personalization Tricks Detectors: The Feature-Inversion Trap in Machine-Generated Text Detection
Lang Gao | Xuhui Li | Chenxi Wang | Mingzhe Li | Wei Liu | Zirui Song | Jinghui Zhang | Rui Yan | Preslav Nakov | Xiuying Chen
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Lang Gao | Xuhui Li | Chenxi Wang | Mingzhe Li | Wei Liu | Zirui Song | Jinghui Zhang | Rui Yan | Preslav Nakov | Xiuying Chen
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
As large language models (LLMs) increasingly imitate personal writing styles, personalization has become a key challenge for machine-generated text (MGT) detection. Yet personalized MGT detection remains largely underexplored. In this work, we introduce StyloBench, the first benchmark for evaluating detector robustness under personalization, built from literary and blog texts paired with their LLM-generated imitations. Experiments across diverse detectors show pronounced performance instability under personalization, with frequent inversions relative to general-domain behavior. To better understand this limitation, we conduct an in-depth analysis and attribute it to a feature-inversion trap, i.e., features that are effective for separating human-written text (HWT) from MGT in general flip their effect in personalized contexts, ultimately misleading detectors. Motivated by this, we propose StyloCheck, a diagnostic framework for predicting detector robustness under personalization. StyloCheck identifies the inverted features and quantifies detector dependence using perturbed texts pronounced in the features. In our experiments, StyloCheck predicts both the direction and magnitude of cross-domain performance shifts with an 85% correlation to actual outcomes. We hope this work will raise awareness of the structural risks introduced by personalization and motivate more robust approaches to personalized MGT detection. The code is available at: https://github.com/mbzuai-nlp/Personalized_MGT_Detect
Audio Jailbreak: An Open Comprehensive Benchmark for Jailbreaking Large Audio-Language Models
Zirui Song | Qian Jiang | Mingxuan Cui | Mingzhe Li | Lang Gao | Zeyu Zhang | Zixiang Xu | Yanbo Wang | Guangxian Ouyang | Zhenhao Chen | Xiuying Chen
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Zirui Song | Qian Jiang | Mingxuan Cui | Mingzhe Li | Lang Gao | Zeyu Zhang | Zixiang Xu | Yanbo Wang | Guangxian Ouyang | Zhenhao Chen | Xiuying Chen
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
The rise of Large Audio-Language Models (LAMs) brings both potential and risks, as their audio outputs may contain harmful or unethical content. However, current research lacks a systematic, quantitative evaluation of LAM safety, especially against jailbreak attacks, which are challenging due to the temporal and semantic nature of speech. To bridge this gap, we introduce AJailBench, the first benchmark specifically designed to evaluate jailbreak vulnerabilities in LAMs. We begin by constructing -Base, a dataset of 1,495 adversarial audio prompts spanning 10 policy-violating categories. Using this dataset, we evaluate several state-of-the-art LAMs and reveal that none exhibit consistent robustness across attacks. To further strengthen jailbreak testing and simulate more realistic attack conditions, we propose a method to generate dynamic adversarial variants. Our Audio Perturbation Toolkit (APT) applies targeted distortions across time, frequency, and amplitude domains. To preserve the original jailbreak intent, we enforce a semantic consistency constraint and employ Bayesian optimization to efficiently search for perturbations that are both subtle and highly effective. This results in AJailBench-APT+, an extended dataset of optimized adversarial audio samples. Our findings demonstrate that even small, semantically preserved perturbations can significantly reduce the safety performance of leading LAMs, underscoring the need for more robust and semantically aware defense mechanisms. We release AJailBench to facilitate future research: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/AudioJailbreak-4262/
ServImage: An Image Generation and Editing Benchmark from Real-world Commercial Imaging Services
Fengxian Ji | Jingpu Yang | Zirui Song | Lang Gao | Junhong Liang | Zhenhao Chen | Jinghui Zhang | Xiuying Chen
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Fengxian Ji | Jingpu Yang | Zirui Song | Lang Gao | Junhong Liang | Zhenhao Chen | Jinghui Zhang | Xiuying Chen
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Recent image generation and editing models demonstrate robust adherence to instructions and high visual quality on academic benchmarks.However, their performance on paid, real-world design projects remains uncertain. We introduce ServImage, a benchmark that explicitly correlates model outputs with economic value in commercial design projects. ServImage consists of (i) ServImageBench: a dataset of 1.07k paid commercial design tasks and 2.05k designer deliverables totaling over $295k, covering portrait, product, and digital content, along with 33k candidate images and 33k human annotations.(ii) ServImageScore: an integrated scoring system that combines three quality dimensions: baseline requirements fulfilment, visual execution quality, and commercial necessity satisfaction. These three dimensions are designed to characterize the factors that drive human payment decisions and indicate whether an image is commercially acceptable.(iii) ServImageModel: under this scoring system, we propose a payment prediction model trained on the human-annotated candidate images, achieving 82.00% accuracy in predicting human payment decisions and producing calibrated payment probabilities.ServImage provides a comprehensive foundation for assessing the commercial viability of image generation models and offers a scalable resource for future research on economically grounded vision systems Github.
2025
Under the Shadow of Babel: How Language Shapes Reasoning in LLMs
Chenxi Wang | Yixuan Zhang | Lang Gao | Zixiang Xu | Zirui Song | Yanbo Wang | Xiuying Chen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Chenxi Wang | Yixuan Zhang | Lang Gao | Zixiang Xu | Zirui Song | Yanbo Wang | Xiuying Chen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Language is not only a tool for communication but also a medium for human cognition and reasoning. If, as linguistic relativity suggests, the structure of language shapes cognitive patterns, then large language models (LLMs) trained on human language may also internalize the habitual logical structures embedded in different languages. To examine this hypothesis, we introduce BICAUSE, a structured bilingual dataset for causal reasoning, which includes semantically aligned Chinese and English samples in both forward and reversed causal forms. Our study reveals three key findings: (1) LLMs exhibit typologically aligned attention patterns, focusing more on causes and sentence-initial connectives in Chinese, while showing a more balanced distribution in English. (2) Models internalize language-specific preferences for causal components order and often rigidly apply them to atypical inputs, leading to degraded performance, especially in Chinese. (3) When causal reasoning succeeds, model representations converge toward semantically aligned abstractions across languages, indicating a shared understanding beyond surface form. Overall, these results suggest that LLMs not only mimic surface linguistic forms but also internalize the reasoning biases shaped by language. Rooted in cognitive linguistic theory, this phenomenon is for the first time empirically verified through structural analysis of model internals.
Word Form Matters: LLMs’ Semantic Reconstruction under Typoglycemia
Chenxi Wang | Tianle Gu | Zhongyu Wei | Lang Gao | Zirui Song | Xiuying Chen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Chenxi Wang | Tianle Gu | Zhongyu Wei | Lang Gao | Zirui Song | Xiuying Chen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Human readers can efficiently comprehend scrambled words, a phenomenon known as Typoglycemia, primarily by relying on word form; if word form alone is insufficient, they further utilize contextual cues for interpretation. While advanced large language models (LLMs) exhibit similar abilities, the underlying mechanisms remain unclear. To investigate this, we conduct controlled experiments to analyze the roles of word form and contextual information in semantic reconstruction and examine LLM attention patterns. Specifically, we first propose SemRecScore, a reliable metric to quantify the degree of semantic reconstruction, and validate its effectiveness. Using this metric, we study how word form and contextual information influence LLMs’ semantic reconstruction ability, identifying word form as the core factor in this process. Furthermore, we analyze how LLMs utilize word form and find that they rely on specialized attention heads to extract and process word form information, with this mechanism remaining stable across varying levels of word scrambling. This distinction between LLMs’ fixed attention patterns primarily focused on word form and human readers’ adaptive strategy in balancing word form and contextual information provides insights into enhancing LLM performance by incorporating human-like, context-aware mechanisms. Code is available on: https://github.com/Aurora-cx/TypoLLM.
Shaping the Safety Boundaries: Understanding and Defending Against Jailbreaks in Large Language Models
Lang Gao | Jiahui Geng | Xiangliang Zhang | Preslav Nakov | Xiuying Chen
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Lang Gao | Jiahui Geng | Xiangliang Zhang | Preslav Nakov | Xiuying Chen
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Jailbreaking in Large Language Models (LLMs) is a major security concern as it can deceive LLMs into generating harmful text. However, understanding of how jailbreaking works remains limited, hindering the development of effective defense strategies. To address this issue, we conduct a large-scale analysis of seven different jailbreak methods and identify that disagreements among methods stem from insufficient observation samples.We introduce the concept of a safety boundary and discover that jailbreaks shift harmful activations outside this boundary, where LLMs become less sensitive to harmful information. Our analysis reveals that low and middle layers play a critical role in these shifts, while deeper layers have a lesser impact.Building on these insights, we propose a novel defense mechanism called Activation Boundary Defense (ABD), which adaptively constrains activations within the safety boundary. To enhance its effectiveness, we use Bayesian optimization to selectively apply the defense to the low and middle layers.Experiments on several benchmark datasets demonstrate that ABD achieves an average Defense Success Rate (DSR) of over 98% against various jailbreak attacks, with less than a 2% impact on the model’s general capabilities.