Wentao Zhang
Other people with similar names: Wentao Zhang
Unverified author pages with similar names: Wentao Zhang
2026
EthicMind: A Risk-Aware Framework for Ethical-Emotional Alignment in Multi-Turn Dialogue
Jiawen Deng | Wei Li | Wentao Zhang | Ziyun Jiao | Fuji Ren
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Jiawen Deng | Wei Li | Wentao Zhang | Ziyun Jiao | Fuji Ren
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Intelligent dialogue systems are increasingly deployed in emotionally and ethically sensitive settings, where failures in either emotional attunement or ethical judgment can cause significant harm. Existing dialogue models typically address empathy and ethical safety in isolation, and often fail to adapt their behavior as ethical risk and user emotion evolve across multi-turn interactions. We formulate ethical-emotional alignment in dialogue as an explicit turn-level decision problem, and propose EthicMind, a risk-aware framework that implements this formulation in multi-turn dialogue at inference time. At each turn, EthicMind jointly analyzes ethical risk signals and user emotion, plans a high-level response strategy, and generates context-sensitive replies that balance ethical guidance with emotional engagement, without requiring additional model training. To evaluate alignment behavior under ethically complex interactions, we introduce a risk-stratified, multi-turn evaluation protocol with a context-aware user simulation procedure. Experimental results show that EthicMind achieves more consistent ethical guidance and emotional engagement than competitive baselines, particularly in high-risk and morally ambiguous scenarios.
Beyond Explicit Refusals: Soft-Failure Attacks on Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Wentao Zhang | Yan Zhuang | ZhuHang Zheng | Mingfei Zhang | Jiawen Deng | Fuji Ren
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Wentao Zhang | Yan Zhuang | ZhuHang Zheng | Mingfei Zhang | Jiawen Deng | Fuji Ren
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Existing jamming attacks on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems typically induce explicit refusals or denial-of-service behaviors, which are conspicuous and easy to detect. In this work, we formalize a subtler availability threat, termed soft failure, which degrades system utility by inducing fluent and coherent yet non-informative responses rather than overt failures. We propose Deceptive Evolutionary Jamming Attack (DEJA), an automated black-box attack framework that generates adversarial documents to trigger such soft failures by exploiting safety-aligned behaviors of large language models. DEJA employs an evolutionary optimization process guided by a fine-grained Answer Utility Score (AUS), computed via an LLM-based evaluator, to systematically undermine the certainty of answers while maintaining high retrieval success.Extensive experiments across multiple RAG configurations and benchmark datasets show that DEJA consistently drives responses toward low-utility soft failures and that the resulting adversarial documents maintain high stealth and effectiveness, proving resilient against common mitigation strategies including perplexity-based detection and input perturbations.