Zhaowei Zhang
2026
Simple Role Assignment is Extraordinarily Effective for Safety Alignment
Zhou Ziheng | Jiakun Ding | Zhaowei Zhang | Ruosen Gao | Ying Nian Wu | Demetri Terzopoulos | Yipeng Kang | Fangwei Zhong | Junqi Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Zhou Ziheng | Jiakun Ding | Zhaowei Zhang | Ruosen Gao | Ying Nian Wu | Demetri Terzopoulos | Yipeng Kang | Fangwei Zhong | Junqi Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Principle-based alignment often lacks context sensitivity and completeness. Grounded in Theory of Mind, we propose role conditioning as a compact alternative: social roles (e.g., mother, judge) implicitly encode both values and the cognitive schemas required to apply them. We introduce a training-free pipeline featuring a role-conditioned generator and iterative role-based critics for refinement. Across five model families, our approach consistently outperforms principle-based, Chain-of-Thought (CoT) and other baselines across benchmarks. Notably, it reduces unsafe outputs on the WildJailbreak benchmark from 81.4% to 3.6% with DeepSeek-V3. Not only for common safety benchmarks, it consistently applies for agentic safety tasks. These results establish role assignment as a powerful, interpretable paradigm for AI alignment and LLM-as-a-Judge construction.
2022
Continuous Decomposition of Granularity for Neural Paraphrase Generation
Xiaodong Gu | Zhaowei Zhang | Sang-Woo Lee | Kang Min Yoo | Jung-Woo Ha
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Xiaodong Gu | Zhaowei Zhang | Sang-Woo Lee | Kang Min Yoo | Jung-Woo Ha
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
While Transformers have had significant success in paragraph generation, they treat sentences as linear sequences of tokens and often neglect their hierarchical information. Prior work has shown that decomposing the levels of granularity (e.g., word, phrase, or sentence) for input tokens has produced substantial improvements, suggesting the possibility of enhancing Transformers via more fine-grained modeling of granularity. In this work, we present continuous decomposition of granularity for neural paraphrase generation (C-DNPG): an advanced extension of multi-head self-attention with: 1) a granularity head that automatically infers the hierarchical structure of a sentence by neurally estimating the granularity level of each input token; and 2) two novel attention masks, namely, granularity resonance and granularity scope, to efficiently encode granularity into attention. Experiments on two benchmarks, including Quora question pairs and Twitter URLs have shown that C-DNPG outperforms baseline models by a significant margin. Qualitative analysis reveals that C-DNPG indeed captures fine-grained levels of granularity with effectiveness.