Xiaoping Zhang
Author directory2026
LeakDojo: Decoding the Leakage Threats of RAG Systems
Maosen Zhang | Jianshuo Dong | Lu Boting | Li Wenyue | Xiaoping Zhang | Tianwei Zhang | Han Qiu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Maosen Zhang | Jianshuo Dong | Lu Boting | Li Wenyue | Xiaoping Zhang | Tianwei Zhang | Han Qiu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enables large language models (LLMs) to leverage external knowledge, but also exposes valuable RAG databases to leakage attacks. As RAG systems grow more complex and LLMs exhibit stronger instruction-following capabilities, existing studies fall short of systematically assessing RAG leakage risks. We present LeakDojo, a configurable framework for controlled evaluation of RAG leakage. Using LeakDojo, we benchmark six existing attacks across fourteen LLMs, four datasets, and diverse RAG systems. Our study reveals that (1) query generation and adversarial instructions contribute independently to leakage, with overall leakage well approximated by their product; (2) stronger instruction-following capability correlates with higher leakage risk; and (3) improvements in RAG faithfulness can introduce increased leakage risk. These findings provide actionable insights for understanding and mitigating RAG leakage in practice. Our codebase is available at https://github.com/yeasen-z/LeakDojo.
INTENT-AS-A-TOOL Makes it Easy to Track Agentic Misalignment
Yutong Zhang | Jianshuo Dong | Peng Xu | Long Wang | Jie Zhang | Tianwei Zhang | Xiaoping Zhang | Han Qiu
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Yutong Zhang | Jianshuo Dong | Peng Xu | Long Wang | Jie Zhang | Tianwei Zhang | Xiaoping Zhang | Han Qiu
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
As large language models (LLMs) are deployed as autonomous agents, safety failures increasingly involve consequential actions. We study agentic misalignment, where agents take harmful actions under goal conflicts and pressures. Using chain-of-thought (CoT) monitoring, we find that harmful execution is often preceded by intent signals in reasoning. However, post-hoc CoT labels are too coarse to show how intent changes during generation. We introduce INTENT-AS-A-TOOL, an approach that adds intent-targeted tools to give the model a dedicated channel for expressing commitment to a target behavior. The probability of calling an intent tool provides a judge-free, fine-grained signal of the model’s tendency to pursue that behavior. Our results show that INTENT-AS-A-TOOL complements CoT monitoring, expands post-hoc CoT labels into dense trajectories, and identifies critical steps for online intervention. These findings suggest that action preferences are useful for tracking agentic misalignment during reasoning. Our code and data are accessible: https://github.com/RebeccaZhang22/intent-as-a-tool.