Rui Li
Other people with similar names: Rui Li, Rui Li, Rui Li, Rui Li, Rui Li
Unverified author pages with similar names: Rui Li
2026
Be Your Own Red Teamer: Safety Alignment via Self-Play and Reflective Experience Replay
Hao Wang | Yanting Wang | Hao Li | Rui Li | Lei Sha
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Hao Wang | Yanting Wang | Hao Li | Rui Li | Lei Sha
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable capabilities but remain vulnerable to adversarial “jailbreak” attacks designed to bypass safety guardrails. Current safety alignment methods depend heavily on static external red teaming, utilizing fixed defense prompts or pre-collected adversarial datasets. This leads to a rigid defense that overfits known patterns and fails to generalize to novel, sophisticated threats. To address this critical limitation, we propose empowering the model to be its own red teamer, capable of achieving autonomous and evolving adversarial attacks. Specifically, we introduce Safety Self- Play (SSP), a system that utilizes a single LLM to act concurrently as both the Attacker (generating jailbreaks) and the Defender (refusing harmful requests) within a unified Reinforcement Learning (RL) loop, dynamically evolving attack strategies to uncover vulnerabilities while simultaneously strengthening defense mechanisms. To ensure the Defender effectively addresses critical safety issues during the self-play, we introduce an advanced Reflective Experience Replay Mechanism, which uses an experience pool accumulated throughout the process. The mechanism employs a Upper Confidence Bound (UCB) sampling strategy to focus on failure cases with low rewards, helping the model learn from past hard mistakes while balancing exploration and exploitation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our SSP approach autonomously evolves robust defense capabilities, significantly outperforming baselines trained on static adversarial datasets and establishing a new benchmark for proactive safety alignment.
SenseJudge: Human-Centric Preference-Driven Judgment Framework
Rui Li | Junfeng Liu | Xiangwen Kong | Zhifang Sui
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Rui Li | Junfeng Liu | Xiangwen Kong | Zhifang Sui
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Large Language Models (LLMs) as judges across various scenarios such as assessing model responses is becoming an increasingly accepted paradigm. However, existing judgment approaches often rely on trained judgers using fixed preference data, which tend to overlook diverse user preferences and struggle to adapt to real-world human-AI dialogue scenarios. To address these limitations, we propose SenseJudge, a customizable judgment framework driven by human preferences and SenseBench, a diverse and challenging instruction following benchmark derived from real-world multi-turn interactions. We applied the automatic judgment framework and benchmark to two tasks: 1) LLMs as personalized judges, and 2) model ranking. We conducted extensive experiments, and the results demonstrate that the SenseJudge framework surpasses other judgment methods and models in the LLMs-as-personalized-judges task and achieves model ranking that aligns with real human sense. Additionally, we conducted analyses on position bias and consistency, alongside ablation studies, which affirmed the robustness of SenseJudge.
HAUNTATTACK: When Attack Follows Reasoning as a Shadow
Jingyuan Ma | Rui Li | Zheng Li | Junfeng Liu | Heming Xia | Lei Sha | Zhifang Sui
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Jingyuan Ma | Rui Li | Zheng Li | Junfeng Liu | Heming Xia | Lei Sha | Zhifang Sui
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Emerging Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) consistently excel in mathematical and reasoning tasks, showcasing remarkable capabilities. However, the enhancement of reasoning abilities and the exposure of internal reasoning processes introduce new safety vulnerabilities. A critical question arises: when reasoning becomes intertwined with harmfulness, will LRMs become more vulnerable to jailbreaks in reasoning mode? To investigate this, we introduce HauntAttack, a novel and general-purpose black-box adversarial attack framework that systematically embeds harmful instructions into reasoning questions. Specifically, we modify key reasoning conditions in existing questions with harmful instructions, thereby constructing a reasoning pathway that guides the model step by step toward unsafe outputs. We evaluate HauntAttack on 11 LRMs and observe an average attack success rate of over 70%, achieving up to 13 percentage points of absolute improvement over the strongest prior baseline. Our further analysis reveals that even advanced safety-aligned models remain highly susceptible to reasoning-based attacks, offering insights into the urgent challenge of balancing reasoning capability and safety in future model development.
Merlin’s Whisper: Enabling Efficient Reasoning in Large Language Models via Black-box Persuasive Prompting
Heming Xia | Cunxiao Du | Rui Li | Chak Tou Leong | Yongqi Li | Wenjie Li
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Heming Xia | Cunxiao Du | Rui Li | Chak Tou Leong | Yongqi Li | Wenjie Li
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Large reasoning models (LRMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in tackling complex tasks through step-by-step thinking. However, this lengthy reasoning process incurs substantial computational and latency overheads, hindering the practical deployment of LRMs. This work presents a new approach to mitigating overthinking in LRMs via black-box persuasive prompting. By treating LRMs as black-box communicators, we investigate how to persuade them to generate concise responses without compromising accuracy. We introduce Whisper, an iterative refinement framework that generates high-quality persuasive prompts from diverse perspectives. Experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that Whisper consistently reduces token usage while preserving performance. Notably, Whisper achieves a 3× reduction in average response length on simple GSM8K questions for the Qwen3 series and delivers an average ∼40% token reduction overall. For closed-source APIs, Whisper reduces token usage on MATH-500 by 46% for Claude-3.7 and 50% for Gemini-2.5. Further analysis reveals the broad applicability of Whisper across data domains, model scales, and families, underscoring the potential of black-box persuasive prompting as a practical strategy for enhancing LRM efficiency.