Ying He
2026
The “Knowledge–Behavior Gap” in Cultural Taboo Safety of Large Language Models
Ying He | Sihang Jiang | Xingzhou Chen | Zhouhong Gu | Yiwei Gu | Minggui HE | Shimin Tao | Mahongxia | Yanghua Xiao
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Ying He | Sihang Jiang | Xingzhou Chen | Zhouhong Gu | Yiwei Gu | Minggui HE | Shimin Tao | Mahongxia | Yanghua Xiao
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Cultural taboo safety is essential for deploying large language models (LLMs), as culturally insensitive outputs may cause offense or even social harm. However, existing cultural benchmarks primarily assess cultural knowledge or values biases, while overlooking whether LLMs can recognize and respect cultural taboos, especially when taboos are implicitly hidden in seemingly harmless questions. Besides, cultural taboos are implicit, and context-dependent, thus poss unique challenges for reliable evaluation. To address these gaps, we introduce **CulShield**, the first public benchmark dedicated to evaluating and improving the cultural taboo safety of LLMs. CulShield spans 77 countries and regions, and includes over 2,020 taboos. It evaluates models along both explicit knowledge and implicit behaviors.Experiments on several advanced LLMs (e.g., GPT-4o-mini, Gemini-2.5-pro) reveal a clear "knowledge-behavior gap": models often fail to apply known taboos during interaction. We further show that variations in linguistic context can significantly affect LLMs’ cultural taboo safety. Code and data is accessible here: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/CulShield-7A0E.
2025
PAFT: Prompt-Agnostic Fine-Tuning
Chenxing Wei | Mingwen Ou | Ying He | Yao Shu | Fei Yu
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Chenxing Wei | Mingwen Ou | Ying He | Yao Shu | Fei Yu
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) often causes overfitting to specific prompt wording, where minor phrasing variations drastically reduce performance. To address this, we propose Prompt-Agnostic Fine-Tuning (PAFT), a method that enhances robustness through dynamic prompt variation during training. PAFT first generates diverse synthetic prompts, then continuously samples from this set to construct training instances, forcing models to learn fundamental task principles rather than surface-level patterns. Across systematic evaluations using both supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning fine-tuning (RLFT), PAFT consistently demonstrates improved performance on benchmarks for question answering, mathematical reasoning, and tool use. It achieves 7% higher generalization accuracy on unseen prompts than standard methods with similar training efficiency. Notably, models trained with PAFT attain 3.2× faster inference speeds due to reduced prompt sensitivity. Ablation studies further validate effectiveness of PAFT, while theoretical analysis reveals that PAFT can effectively enhance the cross-domain generalization ability of LLM.