United States

In this paper, we study whether language models are affected by learned gender stereotypes during the comprehension of stories. Specifically, we investigate how models respond to gender stereotype perturbations through counterfactual data augmentation. Focusing on Question Answering (QA) tasks in fairytales, we modify the FairytaleQA dataset by swapping gendered character information and introducing counterfactual gender stereotypes during training. This allows us to assess model robustness and examine whether learned biases influence story comprehension. Our results show that models exhibit slight performance drops when faced with gender perturbations in the test set, indicating sensitivity to learned stereotypes. However, when fine-tuned on counterfactual training data, models become more robust to anti-stereotypical narratives. Additionally, we conduct a case study demonstrating how incorporating counterfactual anti-stereotype examples can improve inclusivity in downstream applications.

NAACL 2025

Will the Prince Get True Love&#39;s Kiss? On the Model Sensitivity to Gender Perturbation over Fairytale Texts

pertubations

fairytales

bias

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ACL 2024

The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. More information will be announced soon.

Will the Prince Get True Love's Kiss? On the Model Sensitivity to Gender Perturbation over Fairytale Texts

workshop paper

### Welcome to 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Welcome to the 2025 meeting of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics! I am proud to help organize the first NAACL conference to carry the new name of our organization, one that emphasizes inclusion for all of the Americas. I am also pleased to welcome you to Albuquerque, New Mexico, a state whose unique blend of cultural influences will make for an excellent backdrop for NAACL 2025, especially with this year’s special theme on NLP in a Multicultural World. 
**[Continue reading...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jX-qGhqVSZZCIrAnJaz798pflu5Irrdn/view?usp=sharing)**

*- Colin Cherry, Google, NAACL 2025 General Chair* 

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Welcome to 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Language models (LMs) are vulnerable to exploitation for adversarial misuse. Training LMs for safety alignment is extensive, making it hard to respond to fast-developing attacks immediately, such as jailbreaks. We propose self-refine with formatting that achieves outstanding safety even in non-safety-aligned LMs and evaluate our method alongside several defense baselines, demonstrating that it is the safest training-free method against jailbreak attacks. Additionally, we proposed a formatting method that improves the efficiency of the self-refine process while reducing attack success rates in fewer iterations. We observed that non-safety-aligned LMs outperform safety-aligned LMs in safety tasks by giving more helpful and safe responses. In conclusion, our findings can achieve less safety risk with fewer computational costs, allowing non-safety LM to be efficiently utilized in real-world service.

Break the Breakout: Reinventing LM Defense Against Jailbreak Attacks with Self-Refine

In recent years, the use of large language models (LLMs) to generate music content, particularly lyrics, has gained in popularity. These advances provide valuable tools for artists and enhance their creative processes, but they also raise concerns about copyright violations, consumer satisfaction, and content spamming. Previous research has explored content detection in various domains. However, no work has focused on the text modality, lyrics, in music. To address this gap, we curated a diverse dataset of real and synthetic lyrics from multiple languages, music genres, and artists. The generation pipeline was validated using both humans and automated methods. We performed a thorough evaluation of existing synthetic text detection approaches on lyrics, a previously unexplored data type. We also investigated methods to adapt the best-performing features to lyrics through unsupervised domain adaptation. Following both music and industrial constraints, we examined how well these approaches generalize across languages, scale with data availability, handle multilingual language content, and perform on novel genres in few-shot settings. Our findings show promising results that could inform policy decisions around AI-generated music and enhance transparency for users.

Synthetic Lyrics Detection Across Languages and Genres

Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely used for their capabilities, but face threats from jailbreak attacks, which exploit LLMs to generate inappropriate information and bypass their defense system. Existing defenses are often specific to jailbreak attacks and as a result, a robust, attack-independent solution is needed to address both Natural Language Processing (NLP) ambiguities and attack variability. In this study, we have introduced, Summary The Savior, a novel jailbreak detection mechanism leveraging harmful keywords and query-based security-aware summary classification. By analyzing the illegal and improper contents of prompts within the summaries, the proposed method remains robust against attack diversity and NLP ambiguities. Two novel datasets for harmful keyword extraction and security aware summaries utilizing GPT-4 and Llama-3.1 70B respectively have been generated in this regard. Moreover, an "ambiguous harmful" class has been introduced to address content and intent ambiguities. Evaluation results demonstrate that, Summary The Savior achieves higher defense performance, outperforming state-of-the-art defense mechanisms namely Perplexity Filtering, SmoothLLM, Erase and Check with lowest attack success rates across various jailbreak attacks namely PAIR, GCG, JBC and Random Search, on Llama-2, Vicuna-13B and GPT-4. Our codes, models, and results are available at: https://github.com/shrestho10/SummaryTheSavior

Summary the Savior: Harmful Keyword and Query-based Summarization for LLM Jailbreak Defense

A critical challenge in deploying Large Language Models (LLMs) is developing reliable mechanisms to estimate their confidence, enabling systems to determine when to trust model outputs and when to seek human intervention. In this paper, we present a Calibrated Reflection Approach for Enhancing Confidence Estimation in LLMs, a framework that combines structured reasoning with distance-aware calibration techniques. Our approach introduces three key innovations: (1) a Maximum Confidence Selection (MCS) method that comprehensively evaluates confidence across all possible labels, (2) a reflection-based prompting mechanism that enhances reasoning reliability, and (3) a distance-aware calibration technique that accounts for ordinal relationships between labels. We evaluate our framework across diverse datasets, including HelpSteer2, Llama T-REx, and an internal conversational dataset, demonstrating its effectiveness across both conversational and fact-based classification tasks. This work contributes to the broader goal of developing reliable and well-calibrated confidence estimation methods for LLMs, enabling informed decisions about when to trust model outputs and when to defer to human judgement.

A Calibrated Reflection Approach for Enhancing Confidence Estimation in LLMs

Transformer-based pretrained large language models (PLM) such as BERT and GPT have achieved remarkable success in NLP tasks. However, PLMs are prone to encoding stereotypical biases. Although a burgeoning literature has emerged on stereotypical bias mitigation in PLMs, such as work on debiasing gender and racial stereotyping, how such biases manifest and behave internally within PLMs remains largely unknown. Understanding the internal stereotyping mechanisms may allow better assessment of model fairness and guide the development of effective mitigation strategies. In this work, we focus on attention heads, a major component of the Transformer architecture, and propose a bias analysis framework to explore and identify a small set of biased heads that are found to contribute to a PLM's stereotypical bias. We conduct extensive experiments to validate the existence of these biased heads and to better understand how they behave. We investigate gender and racial bias in the English language in two types of Transformer-based PLMs: the encoder-based BERT model and the decoder-based autoregressive GPT model, LLaMA-2 (7B), and LLaMA-2-Chat (7B). Overall, the results shed light on understanding the bias behavior in pretrained language models.

Bias A-head? Analyzing Bias in Transformer-Based Language Model Attention Heads

Language Model Models (LLMs) have improved dramatically in the past few years, increasing their adoption and the scope of their capabilities over time. A significant amount of work is dedicated to "model alignment", i.e., preventing LLMs to generate unsafe responses when deployed into customer-facing applications. One popular method to evaluate safety risks is red-teaming, where agents attempt to bypass alignment by crafting elaborate prompts that trigger unsafe responses from a model. Standard human-driven red-teaming is costly, time-consuming and rarely covers all the recent features (e.g., multi-lingual, multi-modal aspects), while proposed automation methods only cover a small subset of LLMs capabilities (i.e., English or single-turn). We present Multi-lingual Multi-turn Automated Red Teaming (MM-ART), a method to fully automate conversational, multi-lingual red-teaming operations and quickly identify prompts leading to unsafe responses. Through extensive experiments on different languages, we show the studied LLMs are on average 71% more vulnerable after a 5-turn conversation in English than after the initial turn. For conversations in non-English languages, models display up to 195% more safety vulnerabilities than the standard single-turn English approach, confirming the need for automated red-teaming methods matching LLMs capabilities.

Multi-lingual Multi-turn Automated Red Teaming for LLMs

The rapid growth of Large Language Models (LLMs) presents significant privacy, security, and ethical concerns. While much research has proposed methods for defending LLM systems against misuse by malicious actors, researchers have recently complemented these efforts with an offensive approach that involves red teaming, i.e., proactively attacking LLMs with the purpose of identifying their vulnerabilities. This paper provides a concise and practical overview of the LLM red teaming literature, structured so as to describe a multi-component system end-to-end. To motivate red teaming we survey the initial safety needs of some high-profile LLMs, and then dive into the different components of a red teaming system as well as software packages for implementing them. We cover various attack methods, strategies for attack-success evaluation, metrics for assessing experiment outcomes, as well as a host of other considerations. Our survey will be useful for any reader who wants to rapidly obtain a grasp of the major red teaming concepts for their own use in practical applications.

Building Safe GenAI Applications: An End-to-End Overview of Red Teaming for Large Language Models

Uncertainty quantification (UQ) in Large Language Models (LLMs) is essential for their safe and reliable deployment, particularly in critical applications where incorrect outputs can have serious consequences. Current UQ methods typically rely on querying the model multiple times using non-zero temperature sampling to generate diverse outputs for uncertainty estimation. However, the impact of selecting a given temperature parameter is understudied, and our analysis reveals that temperature plays a fundamental role in the quality of uncertainty estimates. The conventional approach of identifying optimal temperature values requires expensive hyperparameter optimization (HPO) that must be repeated for each new model-dataset combination. We propose Monte Carlo Temperature (MCT), a robust sampling strategy that eliminates the need for temperature calibration. Our analysis reveals that: 1) MCT provides more robust uncertainty estimates across a wide range of temperatures, 2) MCT improves the performance of UQ methods by replacing fixed-temperature strategies that do not rely on HPO, and 3) MCT achieves statistical parity with oracle temperatures, which represent the ideal outcome of a well-tuned but computationally expensive HPO process. These findings demonstrate that effective UQ can be achieved without the computational burden of temperature parameter calibration.

Monte Carlo Temperature: a robust sampling strategy for LLM's uncertainty quantification methods

The rapid rise of Language Models (LMs) has expanded their use in several applications. Yet, due to constraints of model size, associated cost, or proprietary restrictions, utilizing state-of-the-art (SOTA) LLMs is not always feasible. With open, smaller LMs emerging, more applications can leverage their capabilities, but selecting the right LM can be challenging as smaller LMs don’t perform well universally. This work tries to bridge this gap by proposing a framework to experimentally evaluate small, open LMs in practical settings through measuring semantic correctness of outputs across three practical aspects: task types, application domains and reasoning types, using diverse prompt styles. It also conducts an in-depth comparison of 10 small, open LMs to identify best LM and prompt style depending on specific application requirement using the proposed framework. We also show that if selected appropriately, they can outperform SOTA LLMs like DeepSeek-v2, GPT-4o-mini, Gemini-1.5-Pro, and even compete with GPT-4o.

Are Small Language Models Ready to Compete with Large Language Models for Practical Applications?

Multi-Aspect Controllable Text Generation (MCTG) introduces fine-grained multiple constraints in natural language generation, i.e. control attributes in topics, sentiments, and detoxification. MCTG demonstrates application prospects for trustworthy generation of Large Language Models (LLMs) but is limited by generalization issues. Existing work exploits additional structures and strategies for solutions, requiring LLMs' modifications. To activate LLMs' MCTG ability, we propose a lightweight MCTG pipeline based on data augmentation and instruction tuning. We analyze aspect bias and correlations in traditional datasets and address these concerns with augmented control attributes and sentences. Augmented datasets are feasible for instruction tuning. We conduct experiments for various LLMs backbone and parameter sizes, demonstrating general effectiveness on MCTG performance.

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Break the Breakout: Reinventing LM Defense Against Jailbreak Attacks with Self-Refine

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An Explainable Approach to Understanding Gender Stereotype Text

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Break the Breakout: Reinventing LM Defense Against Jailbreak Attacks with Self-Refine

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An Explainable Approach to Understanding Gender Stereotype Text

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