Junjie Mu
Author directory2026
Probing Social Identity Bias in Chinese LLMs with Gendered Pronouns and Social Groups
Geng Liu | Li Feng | Junjie Mu | Mengxiao Zhu | Francesco Pierri
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Geng Liu | Li Feng | Junjie Mu | Mengxiao Zhu | Francesco Pierri
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in user-facing applications, raising concerns that they may reflect and amplify social biases. We investigate social identity biases in Chinese LLMs using Mandarin-specific prompts across ten representative models. Our evaluation compares ingroup (“We”) and outgroup (“They”) framings across 240 social groups salient in the Chinese context, using a two-tiered measurement framework that assesses both sentiment and toxicity. The prompt design explicitly accounts for linguistic properties of Mandarin, including the distinction between the default plural pronoun 他们 and the explicitly feminine plural 她们, enabling a controlled comparison of social identity framing effects. Across models, we observe systematic ingroup–outgroup asymmetries, although their expression differs across measurement dimensions. In particular, instruction tuning often reduces sentiment asymmetries, while toxicity gaps remain more persistent. Moreover, the feminine-marked plural 她们 is associated with higher toxicity than the default plural in several models. Our study introduces a language-aware evaluation framework for Chinese LLMs and shows that (i) social identity biases previously documented in English also manifest in Chinese and that (ii) Mandarin-specific linguistic structure can reveal bias patterns that are not directly observable in English-only settings.
A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing: Targeted Routing Hijacking in Federated RAG
Junjie Mu | Qiongxiu Li
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Junjie Mu | Qiongxiu Li
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Federated Retrieval-Augmented Generation (FedRAG) is attractive for privacy-sensitive applications because full local corpora remain on clients. As a result, routing must rely on client-provided semantic profiles, creating a new opportunity for manipulation. We introduce Routing Hijacking, a routing-stage attack in which a malicious client forges its profile to attract target queries despite having irrelevant underlying data. We show that this vulnerability is severe. Across three representative FedRAG routing architectures, Routing Hijacking consistently misroutes target queries and leads to downstream disruptions and failures, including missing evidence, poisoning, incorrect answers, and hallucinations. In a controlled MedQA-USMLE stress test, we further show that poisoned retrieved evidence can mislead models across scales, leading to incorrect answers, hallucinations, and sycophantic failures. Existing defenses do not close this gap: encrypted routing preserves the exploited ranking, and Byzantine-robust Federated Learning (FL) rules transfer poorly to heterogeneous routing profiles. To address this gap, we propose a trust-aware post-routing framework that reweights clients using returned-evidence feedback, including retrieval relevance, profile consistency, and cross-client agreement; online experiments show that it suppresses persistent hijacking over recurring queries and transfers to a learned neural router. Our findings establish routing integrity as a security challenge in FedRAG and highlight the need for stronger defenses for secure federated retrieval.