Yonghyun Jun
Author directory2026
IHDec: Divergence-Steered Contrastive Decoding for Securing Multi-Turn Instruction Hierarchies
Nicole Geumheon Liu | Haeun Jang | Yonghyun Jun | Hwanhee Lee
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Nicole Geumheon Liu | Haeun Jang | Yonghyun Jun | Hwanhee Lee
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Large Language Models (LLMs) often fail to maintain instruction hierarchies (IH) when processing multi-source inputs with varying role-level priorities, paradoxically adhering to lower-priority directives during conflicts. While existing defenses mitigate this issue, they are largely restricted to single-turn scenarios and require expensive fine-tuning. In this paper, we formalize this failure mode in multi-turn contexts via a Jensen-Shannon Divergence (JSD) framework, uncovering a pervasive role-influence inversion phenomenon where subordinate inputs override superior roles. To rectify this without training, we propose IHDec (Instruction Hierarchy-steered Decoding). IHDec leverages JSD to automatically detect token-level hierarchy violations and dynamically executes contrastive decoding to suppress misaligned subordinate roles. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that IHDec outperforms training-based baselines in multi-turn conflicts while fully preserving general response quality. Furthermore, IHDec strengthens safety against adversarial prompt injections and exhibits a robust scaling synergy with larger models.
Code-Switching Reveals Language Anchoring in Multilingual LLMs
Jeonghyun Park | Seunghyun Yoon | Yonghyun Jun | Hwanhee Lee
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Jeonghyun Park | Seunghyun Yoon | Yonghyun Jun | Hwanhee Lee
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Multilingual Large Language Models (MLLMs) are increasingly expected to handle Code-Switched (CS) inputs, yet mixing languages frequently degrades performance relative to source- or target-language monolingual counterparts. To understand this degradation, we use grammar-forced CS as a controlled diagnostic setting for locating CS representations relative to their source and target counterparts. We introduce Anchor Bias, a geometric measure that quantifies language anchoring—whether a CS hidden state aligns closer to its source or target language counterpart. Across diverse MLLMs, Anchor Bias reveals a consistent grammar-frame effect: source-framed CS stays source-anchored, whereas target-framed CS shifts target-ward and shows larger Question Answering (QA) degradation. Motivated by this representational pattern, we propose CANVAS (Contextual Anchor-based Neural Vector Alignment Steering), an inference-time intervention that extracts a source-side canvas from the input and softly steers target-language hidden states toward the source anchor during prefill. CANVAS consistently recovers QA F1 across MLLMs and CS conditions, showing that internal anchoring signals provide an actionable target for mitigating CS inference failures.
Identifying and Mitigating Bottlenecks in Role-Playing Agents: A Systematic Study of Disentangling Character Profile Axes
Yonghyun Jun | Junhyuk Choi | Jeonghyun Park | Jihyeong Park | Nicole Geumheon Liu | Hwanhee Lee
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Yonghyun Jun | Junhyuk Choi | Jeonghyun Park | Jihyeong Park | Nicole Geumheon Liu | Hwanhee Lee
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
While Large Language Model (LLM) role-playing agents have advanced rapidly, it remains unclear which profile elements genuinely drive role-playing quality. To bridge this gap, we introduce a systematic diagnostic framework that disentangles the impact of character profiles along three axes: Familiarity (Known vs. Unknown), Structure (Structured vs. Unstructured), and Disposition (Moral vs. Immoral). Utilizing a unified hierarchical schema (5 dimensions, 28 fields), we construct a controlled dataset of 211 personas and evaluate five LLMs on both single- and multi-turn interactions. Our results reveal a striking asymmetry: Familiarity and Structure show negligible impact, while Disposition produces large, consistent performance degradation for immoral characters across all conditions. Further analyses suggest that the Moral–Immoral gap is amplified by post-SFT alignment, and that this degradation varies substantially across profile attributes. To mitigate this bottleneck, we propose Field-Aware Contrastive Decoding (FACD), a training-free strategy that amplifies suppressed disposition-sensitive signals, significantly closing the performance gap without sacrificing moral-character performance.
2025
Keep Security! Benchmarking Security Policy Preservation in Large Language Model Contexts Against Indirect Attacks in Question Answering
Hwan Chang | Yumin Kim | Yonghyun Jun | Hwanhee Lee
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Hwan Chang | Yumin Kim | Yonghyun Jun | Hwanhee Lee
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in sensitive domains such as enterprise and government, ensuring that they adhere to user-defined security policies within context is critical-especially with respect to information non-disclosure. While prior LLM studies have focused on general safety and socially sensitive data, large-scale benchmarks for contextual security preservation against attacks remain lacking. To address this, we introduce a novel large-scale benchmark dataset, CoPriva, evaluating LLM adherence to contextual non-disclosure policies in question answering. Derived from realistic contexts, our dataset includes explicit policies and queries designed as direct and challenging indirect attacks seeking prohibited information. We evaluate 10 LLMs on our benchmark and reveal a significant vulnerability: many models violate user-defined policies and leak sensitive information. This failure is particularly severe against indirect attacks, highlighting a critical gap in current LLM safety alignment for sensitive applications. Our analysis reveals that while models can often identify the correct answer to a query, they struggle to incorporate policy constraints during generation. In contrast, they exhibit a partial ability to revise outputs when explicitly prompted. Our findings underscore the urgent need for more robust methods to guarantee contextual security.
Dynamic Order Template Prediction for Generative Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis
Yonghyun Jun | Hwanhee Lee
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)
Yonghyun Jun | Hwanhee Lee
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)
Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) assesses sentiments towards specific aspects within texts, resulting in detailed sentiment tuples.Previous ABSA models often used static templates to predict all the elements in the tuples, and these models often failed to accurately capture dependencies between elements. Multi-view prompting method improves the performance of ABSA by predicting tuples with various templates and then assembling the results. However, this method suffers from inefficiencies and out-of-distribution errors. In this paper, we propose a Dynamic Order Template (DOT) method for ABSA, which dynamically creates an order template that contains only the necessary views for each instance. Ensuring the diverse and relevant view generation, our proposed method improves F1 scores on ASQP and ACOS datasets while significantly reducing inference time.
Exploring Persona Sentiment Sensitivity in Personalized Dialogue Generation
Yonghyun Jun | Hwanhee Lee
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Yonghyun Jun | Hwanhee Lee
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Personalized dialogue systems have advanced considerably with the integration of user-specific personas into large language models (LLMs). However, while LLMs can effectively generate personalized responses, the influence of persona sentiment on dialogue quality remains underexplored. In this work, we conduct a large-scale analysis of dialogues generated using a range of polarized user profiles. Our experiments reveal that dialogues involving negatively polarized users tend to overemphasize persona attributes. In contrast, positively polarized profiles yield dialogues that selectively incorporate persona information, resulting in smoother interactions. Furthermore, we find that personas with weak or neutral sentiment generally produce lower-quality dialogues. Motivated by these findings, we propose a dialogue generation approach that explicitly accounts for persona polarity by combining a turn-based generation strategy with a profile ordering mechanism and sentiment-aware prompting. Our study provides new insights into the sensitivity of LLMs to persona sentiment and offers guidance for developing more robust and nuanced personalized dialogue systems.