Rohan Subramanian Thomas
Author directory2026
ProMoral-Bench: Comparing Prompting Strategies for Moral Judgment and Jailbreak Robustness in LLMs
Rohan Subramanian Thomas | Shikhar Shiromani | Abdullah Chaudhry | Ruizhe Li | Vasu Sharma | Kevin Zhu
Proceedings of the 15th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 5th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Rohan Subramanian Thomas | Shikhar Shiromani | Abdullah Chaudhry | Ruizhe Li | Vasu Sharma | Kevin Zhu
Proceedings of the 15th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 5th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Prompt design affects the moral judgments and refusal behavior produced by large language models (LLMs), yet controlled comparisons remain fragmented across datasets and models. We introduce ProMoral-Bench, a benchmark-style comparison of 10 prompting paradigms across four LLM families. Using ETHICS, Scruples, WildJailbreak, and our 200-pair ETHICS-Contrast set, we report task-level metrics together with Moral Competence Score (MCS), jailbreak/over-refusal Safety Robustness Score (SRS), and Unified Moral Safety Score (UMSS). UMSS is a study-specific relative summary of MCS and SRS, not an absolute measure of model safety or moral grounding. In this fixed-template evaluation, compact exemplar-guided scaffolds attain stronger competence-robustness trade-offs at lower token cost than the particular multi-stage variants tested, although multi-stage prompting occasionally improves jailbreak refusal. The few-shot demonstrations are non-overlapping but drawn from the evaluation distributions, so their advantage should not be read as out-of-distribution robustness. Code and data are available at https://github.com/rohanthomas334-sketch/ProMoral_Bench.