Zhenkai Liang
Author directory2026
Self-Evaluation Is Already There: Eliciting Latent Judge Calibration in Base LLMs with Minimal Data
XiuYu Zhang | Yi Shan | Junfeng Fang | Zhenkai Liang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
XiuYu Zhang | Yi Shan | Junfeng Fang | Zhenkai Liang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Large language models are increasingly evaluated by other models, raising a natural question: can a model predict how a judge will score its own output? We find that the ability is largely present before any targeted training: prompted few-shot, a base model already predicts an external judge’s multi-attribute quality scores on open-ended responses well above chance across three benchmarks. We introduce Self-Evaluation Elicitation (SEE), a method that surfaces this latent ability through a short cycle comprising a calibration-coupled reinforcement learning phase that improves the answer and predicts the judge, followed by a masked distillation phase that sharpens the prediction while leaving the answer untouched. From 160 unique examples, roughly 31× fewer than a reinforcement learning baseline, SEE improves held-out calibration across three benchmarks while preserving answer quality. The elicited self-evaluation is sharply localized within the model’s own token distribution and stable across judges it was never trained against, indicating a transferable notion of quality rather than a single judge’s preference. These results reframe judge-aligned self-evaluation as a problem of elicitation rather than acquisition.
2025
PsyScam: A Benchmark for Psychological Techniques in Real-World Scams
Shang Ma | Tianyi Ma | Jiahao Liu | Wei Song | Zhenkai Liang | Xusheng Xiao | Yanfang Ye
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Shang Ma | Tianyi Ma | Jiahao Liu | Wei Song | Zhenkai Liang | Xusheng Xiao | Yanfang Ye
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Over the years, online scams have grown dramatically,with nearly 50% of global consumersencountering scam attempts each week.These scams cause not only significant financiallosses to individuals and businesses, butalso lasting psychological trauma, largely dueto scammers’ strategic employment of psychologicaltechniques (PTs) to manipulate victims.Meanwhile, scammers continually evolve theirtactics by leveraging advances in Large LanguageModels (LLMs) to generate diverse scamvariants that easily bypass existing defenses.To address this pressing problem, we introducePsyScam, a benchmark designed to systematicallycapture the PTs employed in real-worldscam reports, and investigate how LLMs canbe utilized to generate variants of scams basedon the PTs and the contexts provided by thesescams. Specifically, we collect a wide range ofscam reports and ground its annotations of employedPTs in well-established cognitive andpsychological theories. We further demonstrateLLMs’ capabilities in generating through twodownstream tasks: scam completion, and scamaugmentation. Experimental results show thatPsyScam presents significant challenges toexisting models in both detecting and generatingscam content based on the PTs used byreal-world scammers. Our code and dataset areavailable.