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This paper presents a systematic evaluation of Large Language Models' (LLMs) behavior on long-tail distributed (encrypted) texts and their safety implications. We introduce a two-dimensional framework for assessing LLM safety: (1)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-05 Utsav Maskey , Mark Dras , Usman Naseem

People increasingly use large language models (LLMs) for everyday moral and interpersonal guidance, yet these systems cannot interrogate missing context and judge dilemmas as presented. We introduce a perturbation framework for testing the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-09 Tom van Nuenen , Pratik S. Sachdeva

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) excel in integrating visual and textual information for vision-centric tasks, but their handling of inconsistencies between modalities is underexplored. We investigate VLMs' modality preferences when faced with…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-03-05 Ailin Deng , Tri Cao , Zhirui Chen , Bryan Hooi

Despite their advanced reasoning capabilities, state-of-the-art Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) demonstrably lack a core component of human intelligence: the ability to `read the room' and assess deception in complex social…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-11-21 Caixin Kang , Yifei Huang , Liangyang Ouyang , Mingfang Zhang , Ruicong Liu , Yoichi Sato

Continual unlearning poses the challenge of enabling large vision-language models to selectively refuse specific image-instruction pairs in response to sequential deletion requests, while preserving general utility. However, sequential…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Hyundong Jin , Dongyoon Han , Eunwoo Kim

While large language models (LLMs) play increasingly significant roles in society, research shows they continue to generate content that reflects social bias against sensitive groups. Existing benchmarks effectively identify these biases,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-12 Tian Xie , Tongxin Yin , Vaishakh Keshava , Xueru Zhang , Siddhartha Reddy Jonnalagadda

User queries are often underspecified and may admit multiple valid interpretations. Rather than silently making assumptions about the user's intent, a helpful assistant should surface such ambiguity by asking a clarifying question. Doing so…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Jinyan Su , Claire Cardie

While large language models (LLMs) have increasingly been applied to hate speech detoxification, the prompts often trigger safety alerts, causing LLMs to refuse the task. In this study, we systematically investigate false refusal behavior…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Kyuri Im , Shuzhou Yuan , Michael Färber

Large Language Models (LLMs) are seemingly infiltrating every domain, and the legal context is no exception. In this paper, we present the results of three experiments (total N = 288) that investigated lay people's willingness to act upon,…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2025-03-24 Eike Schneiders , Tina Seabrooke , Joshua Krook , Richard Hyde , Natalie Leesakul , Jeremie Clos , Joel Fischer

Large language models must balance their weight-encoded knowledge with in-context information from prompts to generate accurate responses. This paper investigates this interplay by analyzing how models of varying capacities within the same…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-17 Mohammad Reza Samsami , Mats Leon Richter , Juan Rodriguez , Megh Thakkar , Sarath Chandar , Maxime Gasse

Negation has been shown to be a major bottleneck for masked language models, such as BERT. However, whether this finding still holds for larger-sized auto-regressive language models (``LLMs'') has not been studied comprehensively. With the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-16 Thinh Hung Truong , Timothy Baldwin , Karin Verspoor , Trevor Cohn

Modern large language models (LLMs) are typically trained and deployed using structured role tags (e.g. system, user, assistant, tool) that explicitly mark the source of each piece of context. While these tags are essential for instruction…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Xu Pan , Jingxuan Fan , Zidi Xiong , Ely Hahami , Jorin Overwiening , Ziqian Xie

Evaluating aligned large language models' (LLMs) ability to recognize and reject unsafe user requests is crucial for safe, policy-compliant deployments. Existing evaluation efforts, however, face three limitations that we address with…

In this paper, we study the response of large models from the BERT family to incoherent inputs that should confuse any model that claims to understand natural language. We define simple heuristics to construct such examples. Our experiments…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-03-18 Ashim Gupta , Giorgi Kvernadze , Vivek Srikumar

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become foundational in modern language-driven software applications, profoundly influencing daily life. A critical technique in leveraging their potential is role-playing, where LLMs simulate diverse roles…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2026-04-23 Xinyue Li , Zhenpeng Chen , Jie M. Zhang , Ying Xiao , Tianlin Li , Weisong Sun , Yang Liu , Yiling Lou , Xuanzhe Liu

Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly rely on external tools (file operations, API calls, database transactions) to autonomously complete complex multi-step tasks. Practitioners deploy defense-trained models to protect against…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Shawn Li , Yue Zhao

Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable multimodal performance yet remain prone to factual hallucinations, particularly in long-tail or specialized domains. Moreover, current models exhibit a weak capacity to refuse…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-04-30 Junru Song , Yimeng Hu , Yijing Chen , Huining Li , Qian Li , Lizhen Cui , Yuntao Du

Large language models often respond to ambiguous requests by implicitly committing to one interpretation, frustrating users and creating safety risks when that interpretation is wrong. We propose generating a single structured response that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Irina Saparina , Mirella Lapata

Abstention, the refusal of large language models (LLMs) to provide an answer, is increasingly recognized for its potential to mitigate hallucinations and enhance safety in LLM systems. In this survey, we introduce a framework to examine…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-13 Bingbing Wen , Jihan Yao , Shangbin Feng , Chenjun Xu , Yulia Tsvetkov , Bill Howe , Lucy Lu Wang

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly act as autonomous agents that must decide when to answer directly vs. when to invoke external tools. Prior work studying adaptive tool use has largely treated tool necessity as a model-agnostic…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Yize Cheng , Chenrui Fan , Mahdi JafariRaviz , Keivan Rezaei , Soheil Feizi