EMNLP 2025

November 05, 2025

Suzhou, China

Would you like to see your presentation here, made available to a global audience of researchers?
Add your own presentation or have us affordably record your next conference.

Incorporating external context can significantly enhance the response quality of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, real-world contexts often mix relevant information with disproportionate inappropriate content, posing reliability risks. How do LLMs process and prioritize mixed context? To study this, we introduce the Poisoned Context Testbed, pairing queries with real-world contexts containing relevant and inappropriate content. Inspired by associative learning in animals, we adapt the Rescorla-Wagner (RW) model from neuroscience to quantify how competing contextual signals influence LLM outputs. Our adapted model reveals a consistent behavioral pattern: LLMs exhibit a strong tendency to incorporate information that is less prevalent in the context. This susceptibility is harmful in real-world settings, where small amounts of inappropriate content can substantially degrade response quality. Empirical evaluations on our testbed further confirm this vulnerability. To tackle this, we introduce RW-Steering, a two-stage finetuning-based approach that enables the model to internally identify and ignore inappropriate signals. Unlike prior methods that rely on extensive supervision across diverse context mixtures, RW-Steering generalizes robustly across varying proportions of inappropriate content. Experiments show that our best fine-tuned model improves response quality by 39.8% and reverses the undesirable behavior curve, establishing RW-Steering as a robust, generalizable solution for improving LLM safety in real-world use.

Downloads

SlidesPaperTranscript English (automatic)

Next from EMNLP 2025

Hope vs. Hate: Understanding User Interactions with LGBTQ+ News Content in Mainstream US News Media through the Lens of Hope Speech
poster

Hope vs. Hate: Understanding User Interactions with LGBTQ+ News Content in Mainstream US News Media through the Lens of Hope Speech

EMNLP 2025

+1
Ashiqur R. KhudaBukhsh and 3 other authors

05 November 2025

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

Select topic of interest (you can select more than one)

PRESENTATIONS

  • All Presentations
  • For Librarians
  • Resource Center
  • Free Trial
Underline Science, Inc.
1216 Broadway, 2nd Floor, New York, NY 10001, USA

© 2025 Underline - All rights reserved