Qiang Duan
Author directory2026
CEE: An Inference-Time Jailbreak Defense for Embodied Intelligence via Subspace Concept Rotation
Jirui Yang | Zheyu Lin | Zhihui Lu | Yinggui Wang | Lei Wang | Tao Wei | Qiang Duan | Xin Du | Shuhan Yang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Jirui Yang | Zheyu Lin | Zhihui Lu | Yinggui Wang | Lei Wang | Tao Wei | Qiang Duan | Xin Du | Shuhan Yang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Large language models (LLMs) are widely used for task understanding and action planning in embodied intelligence (EI) systems, but their adoption substantially increases vulnerability to jailbreak attacks. While recent work explores inference-time defenses, existing methods rely on static interventions on intermediate representations, which often degrade generation quality and impair adherence to task instructions, reducing system usability in EI settings. We propose a dynamic defense framework. For each EI inference request, we dynamically construct a task-specific safety-semantic subspace, project its hidden state to the most relevant direction, and apply SLERP rotation for adaptive safety control. At comparable defense success rates, our method preserves generation quality, improves usability, reduces tuning cost, and strengthens robustness in EI scenarios.
LatentRefusal: Latent-Signal Refusal for Unanswerable Text-to-SQL Queries
Xuancheng Ren | Shijing Hu | Zhihui Lu | Jiangqi Huang | Qiang Duan
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Xuancheng Ren | Shijing Hu | Zhihui Lu | Jiangqi Huang | Qiang Duan
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
In LLM-based Text-to-SQL systems, unanswerable and underspecified user queries may generate not only incorrect text but also executable programs that yield misleading results or violate safety constraints, thus posing a major barrier to safe deployment. Existing refusal strategies for such queries either rely on output-level instruction following, which is brittle due to model hallucinations, or on estimating output uncertainty, which adds complexity and overhead. To address this challenge, we first formalize safe refusal in Text-to-SQL systems as an answerability-gating problem, and then propose LatentRefusal, a latent-signal refusal mechanism that predicts query answerability from intermediate hidden activations of an LLM. We introduce the Tri-Residual Gated Encoder (TRGE), a lightweight probing architecture, to suppress schema noise and amplify sparse, localized question–schema mismatch cues that indicate unanswerability. Extensive empirical evaluations across diverse ambiguous and unanswerable settings, together with ablations and interpretability analyses, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme and show that LatentRefusal provides an attachable, efficient safety layer for Text-to-SQL systems. Across four benchmarks, LatentRefusal achieves an average F1 of 88.5% and 88.8% on Llama-3.1-8B and Qwen-3-8B respectively, while adding ~2ms probe overhead.