Hua Shen


2025

Existing research assesses LLMs’ values by analyzing their stated inclinations, overlooking potential discrepancies between stated values and actions—termed the “Value-Action Gap.” This study introduces ValueActionLens, a framework to evaluate the alignment between LLMs’ stated values and their value-informed actions. The framework includes a dataset of 14.8k value-informed actions across 12 cultures and 11 social topics, along with two tasks measuring alignment through three metrics. Experiments show substantial misalignment between LLM-generated value statements and their actions, with significant variations across scenarios and models. Misalignments reveal potential harms, highlighting risks in relying solely on stated values to predict behavior. The findings stress the need for context-aware evaluations of LLM values and the value-action gaps.
Email is a vital conduit for human communication across businesses, organizations, and broader societal contexts. In this study, we aim to model the intents, expectations, and responsiveness in email exchanges. To this end, we release SIZZLER, a new dataset containing 1800 emails annotated with nuanced types of intents and expectations. We benchmark models ranging from feature-based logistic regression to zero-shot prompting of large language models. Leveraging the predictive model for intent, expectations, and 14 other features, we analyze 11.3M emails from GMANE to study how linguistic and social factors influence the conversational dynamics in email exchanges. Through our causal analysis, we find that the email response rates are influenced by social status, argumentation, and in certain limited contexts, the strength of social connection.
The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has opened up promising opportunities for their downstream applications in question-answering (QA), such as ChatGPT, ChatGLM, etc. However, such LLMs do not perform very well in domain-specific QA tasks without fine-tuning. But directly fine-tuning LLMs on domain-specific corpus data may lead to catastrophic forgetting, causing the LLMs to lose their general language capability. To address this problem, we propose the Knowledge-Enhanced Fine-Tuning (KEFT) method, an unsupervised fine-tuning approach to enhance the knowledge capability of LLMs in domain-specific QA tasks while preserving their general language capability. KEFT leverages the inherent language comprehension of pre-trained LLMs to generate synthetic-QA datasets from domain-specific corpus data autonomously for fine-tuning, and adopts a Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) method to further alleviate over-fitting. Furthermore, to enhance the representation of domain-specific knowledge, we introduce a knowledge-enhanced fine-tuning loss function, which encourages the model to learn the knowledge-question connection, thereby generating natural and knowledgeable answers. Our evaluations across multiple domain-specific datasets demonstrate that KEFT surpasses state-of-the-art fine-tuning approaches, enhancing the performance of various LLMs in QA tasks in both English and Chinese languages.
As AI advances, aligning it with diverse human and societal values grows critical. But how do we define these values and measure AI’s adherence to them? We present ValueCompass, a framework grounded in psychological theories, to assess human-AI alignment. Applying it to five diverse LLMs and 112 humans from seven countries across four scenarios—collaborative writing, education, public sectors, and healthcare—we uncover key misalignments. For example, humans prioritize national security, while LLMs often reject it. Values also shift across contexts, demanding scenario-specific alignment strategies. This work advances AI design by mapping how systems can better reflect societal ethics.

2023

Current disfluency detection models focus on individual utterances each from a single speaker. However, numerous discontinuity phenomena in spoken conversational transcripts occur across multiple turns, which can not be identified by disfluency detection models. This study addresses these phenomena by proposing an innovative Multi-Turn Cleanup task for spoken conversational transcripts and collecting a new dataset, MultiTurnCleanup. We design a data labeling schema to collect the high-quality dataset and provide extensive data analysis. Furthermore, we leverage two modeling approaches for experimental evaluation as benchmarks for future research.
Augmented Language Models (ALMs) empower large language models with the ability to use tools, transforming them into intelligent agents for real-world interactions. However, most existing frameworks for ALMs, to varying degrees, are deficient in the following critical features: flexible customization, collaborative democratization, and holistic evaluation. This paper proposes Gentopia, a lightweight and extensible framework for ALMs. Gentopia allows the flexible customization of agents through simple configurations, seamlessly integrating various language models, task formats, prompting modules, and plugins into a unified paradigm. Furthermore, we establish Gentpool, a public platform enabling the registration and sharing of user-customized agents. Agents registered in Gentpool are composable such that they can be assembled together for agent collaboration, advancing the democratization of artificial intelligence. To ensure high-quality agents, Gentbench, an integral component of Gentpool, is designed to thoroughly evaluate user-customized agents across diverse aspects such as safety, robustness, efficiency, etc. We release Gentopia on Github and will continuously move forward.

2022

Existing self-explaining models typically favor extracting the shortest possible rationales — snippets of an input text “responsible for” corresponding output — to explain the model prediction, with the assumption that shorter rationales are more intuitive to humans. However, this assumption has yet to be validated. Is the shortest rationale indeed the most human-understandable? To answer this question, we design a self-explaining model, LimitedInk, which allows users to extract rationales at any target length. Compared to existing baselines, LimitedInk achieves compatible end-task performance and human-annotated rationale agreement, making it a suitable representation of the recent class of self-explaining models. We use LimitedInk to conduct a user study on the impact of rationale length, where we ask human judges to predict the sentiment label of documents based only on LimitedInk-generated rationales with different lengths. We show rationales that are too short do not help humans predict labels better than randomly masked text, suggesting the need for more careful design of the best human rationales.