Xiawei Wang
Author directory2026
ASSERT: A Measurement Pipeline for GenAI Audits
Riccardo Fogliato | Abhinav Palia | Xiawei Wang | Emily Sheng | Chad Atalla | Jean Garcia-Gathright | Nicholas Pangakis | Sharman Tan | Dan Vann | Hannah Washington | P. Alex Dow | Heba Elfardy | Hanna Wallach | Sandeep Atluri
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track
Riccardo Fogliato | Abhinav Palia | Xiawei Wang | Emily Sheng | Chad Atalla | Jean Garcia-Gathright | Nicholas Pangakis | Sharman Tan | Dan Vann | Hannah Washington | P. Alex Dow | Heba Elfardy | Hanna Wallach | Sandeep Atluri
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track
Audits of generative AI (GenAI) systems often summarize behavior as a reported rate: how often the audited system complies with policy. Researchers and stakeholders use that rate to compare systems, track regressions, and gate deployment. A reported rate reflects both the system under audit and the measurement choices behind it, so a change in the rate can leave it unclear whether the system or those choices moved. We introduce ASSERT, a specification-driven measurement pipeline for GenAI audits that ties each reported rate to a written specification of the measurement choices used to produce it. ASSERT helps draft a behavioral rubric and test cases, then runs the audit against a GenAI system and returns a reported rate. In a case study on conversational deception, we observe that the reported rate moves substantially with the dialogue setup, the simulated user, the judge, and the evidence bar for non-compliance. These measurement choices substantially change the reported rate and can reorder GenAI system rankings. Because each reported rate is tied to an explicit specification, differences across audits are easier to attribute and interpret.
2025
Jailbreak Distillation: Renewable Safety Benchmarking
Jingyu Zhang | Ahmed Elgohary | Xiawei Wang | A S M Iftekhar | Ahmed Magooda | Benjamin Van Durme | Daniel Khashabi | Kyle Jackson
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Jingyu Zhang | Ahmed Elgohary | Xiawei Wang | A S M Iftekhar | Ahmed Magooda | Benjamin Van Durme | Daniel Khashabi | Kyle Jackson
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Large language models (LLMs) are rapidly deployed in critical applications, raising urgent needs for robust safety benchmarking. We propose Jailbreak Distillation (JBDistill), a novel benchmark construction framework that “distills” jailbreak attacks into high-quality and easily-updatable safety benchmarks. JBDistill utilizes a small set of development models and existing jailbreak attack algorithms to create a candidate prompt pool, then employs prompt selection algorithms to identify an effective subset of prompts as safety benchmarks. JBDistill addresses challenges in existing safety evaluation: the use of consistent evaluation prompts across models ensures fair comparisons and reproducibility. It requires minimal human effort to rerun the JBDistill pipeline and produce updated benchmarks, alleviating concerns on saturation and contamination. Extensive experiments demonstrate our benchmarks generalize robustly to 13 diverse evaluation models held out from benchmark construction, including proprietary, specialized, and newer-generation LLMs, significantly outperforming existing safety benchmarks in effectiveness while maintaining high separability and diversity. Our framework thus provides an effective, sustainable, and adaptable solution for streamlining safety evaluation.