Ruqi Zhang
Author directory2026
Who Tests the Testers? Systematic Enumeration and Coverage Audit of LLM Agent Tool Call Safety
Xuan Chen | Lu Yan | Ruqi Zhang | Xiangyu Zhang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Xuan Chen | Lu Yan | Ruqi Zhang | Xiangyu Zhang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Large Language Model (LLM) agents increasingly act through external tools, making their safety contingent on tool-call workflows rather than text generation alone. While recent benchmarks evaluate agents across diverse environments and risk categories, a fundamental question remains unanswered: how complete are existing test suites, and what unsafe interaction patterns persist even after an agent passes the benchmark? We propose SafeAudit, a meta-audit framework that addresses this gap through two contributions. First, an LLM-based enumerator that systematically generates test cases by enumerating valid tool-call workflows and diverse user scenarios. Second, we introduce rule-resistance, a non-semantic, quantitative metric that distills compact safety rules from existing benchmarks and identifies unsafe interaction patterns that remain uncovered under those rules. Across 3 benchmarks and 12 environments, SafeAudit uncovers more than 20% residual unsafe behaviors that existing benchmarks fail to expose, with coverage growing monotonically as the testing budget increases. Our results highlight significant completeness gaps in current safety evaluation and motivate meta-auditing as a necessary complement to benchmark-based agent safety testing. Examples and implementations are available at https://github.com/XuanChen-xc/SafeAudit.
2025
CoT-UQ: Improving Response-wise Uncertainty Quantification in LLMs with Chain-of-Thought
Boxuan Zhang | Ruqi Zhang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Boxuan Zhang | Ruqi Zhang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Large language models (LLMs) excel in many tasks but struggle to accurately quantify uncertainty in their generated responses. This limitation makes it challenging to detect misinformation and ensure reliable decision-making. Existing uncertainty quantification (UQ) methods for LLMs are primarily prompt-wise rather than response-wise, often requiring multiple response samples, which leads to inefficiency. Moreover, LLMs have been shown to be overconfident, particularly when using reasoning steps to derive their answers. In this work, we introduce a novel approach to quantify response-wise uncertainty by integrating LLMs’ inherent reasoning capabilities through Chain-of-Thought (CoT) into the UQ process. Our CoT-UQ framework captures critical information during inference by extracting keywords from each reasoning step and assessing their importance to the final answer. The uncertainty scores of keywords are then aggregated based on their significance to produce a final uncertainty estimate. We conduct extensive experiments based on Llama Family with model sizes varying from 8B to 13B across logical and mathematical reasoning tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that CoT-UQ significantly outperforms existing UQ methods, achieving an average improvement of 5.9% AUROC compared to current UQ methods.
Reward-Shifted Speculative Sampling Is An Efficient Test-Time Weak-to-Strong Aligner
Bolian Li | Yanran Wu | Xinyu Luo | Ruqi Zhang
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Bolian Li | Yanran Wu | Xinyu Luo | Ruqi Zhang
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences has become a critical step in their development. Recent research has increasingly focused on test-time alignment, where additional compute is allocated during inference to enhance LLM safety and reasoning capabilities. However, these test-time alignment techniques often incur substantial inference costs, limiting their practical application. We are inspired by the speculative sampling acceleration, which leverages a small draft model to efficiently predict future tokens, to address the efficiency bottleneck of test-time alignment. We introduce the reward-shifted speculative sampling (SSS) algorithm, in which the draft model is aligned with human preferences, while the target model remains unchanged. We theoretically demonstrate that the distributional shift between the aligned draft model and the unaligned target model can be exploited to recover the RLHF optimal solution without actually obtaining it, by modifying the acceptance criterion and bonus token distribution. Our algorithm achieves superior gold reward scores at a significantly reduced inference cost in test-time weak-to-strong alignment experiments, thereby validating both its effectiveness and efficiency.