Denghui Zhang


2025

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EscapeBench: Towards Advancing Creative Intelligence of Language Model Agents
Cheng Qian | Peixuan Han | Qinyu Luo | Bingxiang He | Xiusi Chen | Yuji Zhang | Hongyi Du | Jiarui Yao | Xiaocheng Yang | Denghui Zhang | Yunzhu Li | Heng Ji
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Language model agents excel in long-session planning and reasoning, but existing benchmarks primarily focus on goal-oriented tasks with explicit objectives, neglecting creative adaptation in unfamiliar environments. To address this, we introduce EscapeBench—a benchmark suite of room escape game environments designed to challenge agents with creative reasoning, unconventional tool use, and iterative problem-solving to uncover implicit goals. Our results show that current LM models, despite employing working memory and Chain-of-Thought reasoning, achieve only 15% average progress without hints, highlighting their limitations in creativity. To bridge this gap, we propose EscapeAgent, a framework designed to enhance creative reasoning through Foresight (innovative tool use) and Reflection (identifying unsolved tasks). Experiments show that EscapeAgent can execute action chains over 1,000 steps while maintaining logical coherence. It navigates and completes games with up to 40% fewer steps and hints, performs robustly across difficulty levels, and achieves higher action success rates with more efficient and innovative puzzle-solving strategies.

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Beyond Reactive Safety: Risk-Aware LLM Alignment via Long-Horizon Simulation
Chenkai Sun | Denghui Zhang | ChengXiang Zhai | Heng Ji
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025

Given the growing influence of language model-based agents on high-stakes societal decisions, from public policy to healthcare, ensuring their beneficial impact requires understanding the far-reaching implications of their suggestions. We propose a proof-of-concept framework that projects how model-generated advice could propagate through societal systems on a macroscopic scale over time, enabling more robust alignment. To assess the long-term safety awareness of language models, we also introduce a dataset of 100 indirect harm scenarios, testing models’ ability to foresee adverse, non-obvious outcomes from seemingly harmless user prompts. Our approach achieves not only over 20% improvement on the new dataset but also an average win rate exceeding 70% against strong baselines on existing safety benchmarks (AdvBench, SafeRLHF, WildGuardMix), suggesting a promising direction for safer agents.

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ALinFiK: Learning to Approximate Linearized Future Influence Kernel for Scalable Third-Parity LLM Data Valuation
Yanzhou Pan | Huawei Lin | Yide Ran | Jiamin Chen | Xiaodong Yu | Weijie Zhao | Denghui Zhang | Zhaozhuo Xu
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)

Large Language Models (LLMs) heavily rely on high-quality training data, making data valuation crucial for optimizing model performance, especially when working within a limited budget. In this work, we aim to offer a third-party data valuation approach that benefits both data providers and model developers. We introduce a linearized future influence kernel (LinFiK), which assesses the value of individual data samples in improving LLM performance during training. We further propose ALinFiK, a learning strategy to approximate LinFiK, enabling scalable data valuation. Our comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that this approach surpasses existing baselines in effectiveness and efficiency, demonstrating significant scalability advantages as LLM parameters increase.

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LLMs and Copyright Risks: Benchmarks and Mitigation Approaches
Denghui Zhang | Zhaozhuo Xu | Weijie Zhao
Proceedings of the 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 5: Tutorial Abstracts)

Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing, but their widespread use has raised significant copyright concerns. This tutorial addresses the complex intersection of LLMs and copyright law, providing researchers and practitioners with essential knowledge and tools to navigate this challenging landscape. The tutorial begins with an overview of relevant copyright principles and their application to AI, followed by an examination of specific copyright issues in LLM development and deployment. A key focus will be on technical approaches to copyright risk assessment and mitigation in LLMs. We will introduce benchmarks for evaluating copyright-related risks, including memorization detection and probing techniques. The tutorial will then cover practical mitigation strategies, such as machine unlearning, efficient fine-tuning methods, and alignment approaches to reduce copyright infringement risks. Ethical considerations and future directions in copyright-aware AI development will also be discussed.

2024

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Do LLMs Know to Respect Copyright Notice?
Jialiang Xu | Shenglan Li | Zhaozhuo Xu | Denghui Zhang
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Prior study shows that LLMs sometimes generate content that violates copyright. In this paper, we study another important yet underexplored problem, i.e., will LLMs respect copyright information in user input, and behave accordingly? The research problem is critical, as a negative answer would imply that LLMs will become the primary facilitator and accelerator of copyright infringement behavior. We conducted a series of experiments using a diverse set of language models, user prompts, and copyrighted materials, including books, news articles, API documentation, and movie scripts. Our study offers a conservative evaluation of the extent to which language models may infringe upon copyrights when processing user input containing protected material. This research emphasizes the need for further investigation and the importance of ensuring LLMs respect copyright regulations when handling user input to prevent unauthorized use or reproduction of protected content. We also release a benchmark dataset serving as a test bed for evaluating infringement behaviors by LLMs and stress the need for future alignment.