Zhou Yang
Author directory2026
MultiCodeAttack: Iterative Jailbreak Attacking on LLMs with Multi-Code Prompt Injection
Weifeng Sun | Meng Yan | Zhou Yang | Yuchen Chen | Song Sun | David Lo
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Weifeng Sun | Meng Yan | Zhou Yang | Yuchen Chen | Song Sun | David Lo
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate strong generalization capabilities but remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks that induce restricted text or malicious code generation.Recent structured jailbreaks embed adversarial intent into code-like templates and have demonstrated promising effectiveness.However, existing approaches typically operate within a fixed template design and a single programming language, without considering language diversity or adaptive template evolution, thereby limiting the exploration of cross-language jailbreak behaviors.In this paper, we present MultiCodeAttack, a structured jailbreak framework that systematically explores and optimizes multi-language code templates.MultiCodeAttack maintains a diverse template library across programming languages, dynamically selects languages with higher attack effectiveness via a multi-armed bandit strategy, and evolves templates through semantic-preserving mutation guided by response-aware signals.Extensive experiments on 8 LLMs show that MultiCodeAttack outperforms existing jailbreak baselines, achieving 28.23%–832.59% higher harmful text generation.On malicious code generation across 11 LLMs, MultiCodeAttack produces up to 136.22% more malicious outputs than the baseline methods.Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/MultiCodeAttack/.
ManimAgent: Self-Evolving Multimodal Agents for Visual Education
Wenjia Jiang | Zongyuan Cai | Yuanhang Shao | Chenru Wang | Boyan Han | Zhixue Song | Keyu Chen | Shengwei An | Xu Yang | Zhou Yang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Wenjia Jiang | Zongyuan Cai | Yuanhang Shao | Chenru Wang | Boyan Han | Zhixue Song | Keyu Chen | Shengwei An | Xu Yang | Zhou Yang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Multi-round reflection lets agents built on large language models recover from failures within a single task, but lessons learned across many reflection rounds on one task are discarded before the next begins. We study this gap on a code-generation task: from a scientific paper section, the agent writes executable Manim code. We present ManimAgent, a self-evolving multimodal agent that carries reflection experience across tasks through a dual-channel Episodic Memory Bank grown entirely from its own task stream, with no weight updates and no human seeds. After each animation converges, a vision–language model scores the rendered keyframes; the resulting signals populate a positive channel ℳ+ that stores success rationales as soft Reference Examples, and a negative channel ℳ- that stores VLM-screened failure patterns as hard Known Pitfalls. On a fixed-probe evaluation against no-memory, matched-budget retrieval-augmented generation, and shuffled-memory baselines, blind human Pass@1 rises and reflection rounds fall as memory size grows. We will release the code, frozen memory snapshots, and the task stream.
2024
CTSM: Combining Trait and State Emotions for Empathetic Response Model
Yufeng Wang | Chao Chen | Zhou Yang | Shuhui Wang | Xiangwen Liao
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Yufeng Wang | Chao Chen | Zhou Yang | Shuhui Wang | Xiangwen Liao
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Empathetic response generation endeavors to empower dialogue systems to perceive speakers’ emotions and generate empathetic responses accordingly. Psychological research demonstrates that emotion, as an essential factor in empathy, encompasses trait emotions, which are static and context-independent, and state emotions, which are dynamic and context-dependent. However, previous studies treat them in isolation, leading to insufficient emotional perception of the context, and subsequently, less effective empathetic expression. To address this problem, we propose Combining Trait and State emotions for Empathetic Response Model (CTSM). Specifically, to sufficiently perceive emotions in dialogue, we first construct and encode trait and state emotion embeddings, and then we further enhance emotional perception capability through an emotion guidance module that guides emotion representation. In addition, we propose a cross-contrastive learning decoder to enhance the model’s empathetic expression capability by aligning trait and state emotions between generated responses and contexts. Both automatic and manual evaluation results demonstrate that CTSM outperforms state-of-the-art baselines and can generate more empathetic responses. Our code is available at https://github.com/wangyufeng-empty/CTSM
An Iterative Associative Memory Model for Empathetic Response Generation
Zhou Yang | Zhaochun Ren | Yufeng Wang | Haizhou Sun | Chao Chen | Xiaofei Zhu | Xiangwen Liao
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Zhou Yang | Zhaochun Ren | Yufeng Wang | Haizhou Sun | Chao Chen | Xiaofei Zhu | Xiangwen Liao
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Empathetic response generation aims to comprehend the cognitive and emotional states in dialogue utterances and generate proper responses. Psychological theories posit that comprehending emotional and cognitive states necessitates iteratively capturing and understanding associated words across dialogue utterances. However, existing approaches regard dialogue utterances as either a long sequence or independent utterances for comprehension, which are prone to overlook the associated words between them. To address this issue, we propose an Iterative Associative Memory Model (IAMM) for empathetic response generation. Specifically, we employ a novel second-order interaction attention mechanism to iteratively capture vital associated words between dialogue utterances and situations, dialogue history, and a memory module (for storing associated words), thereby accurately and nuancedly comprehending the utterances.We conduct experiments on the Empathetic-Dialogue dataset. Both automatic and human evaluations validate the efficacy of the model. Variant experiments on LLMs also demonstrate that attending to associated words improves empathetic comprehension and expression.
2023
Exploiting Emotion-Semantic Correlations for Empathetic Response Generation
Zhou Yang | Zhaochun Ren | Yufeng Wang | Xiaofei Zhu | Zhihao Chen | Tiecheng Cai | Yunbing Wu | Yisong Su | Sibo Ju | Xiangwen Liao
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Zhou Yang | Zhaochun Ren | Yufeng Wang | Xiaofei Zhu | Zhihao Chen | Tiecheng Cai | Yunbing Wu | Yisong Su | Sibo Ju | Xiangwen Liao
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Empathetic response generation aims to generate empathetic responses by understanding the speaker’s emotional feelings from the language of dialogue. Recent methods capture emotional words in the language of communicators and construct them as static vectors to perceive nuanced emotions. However, linguistic research has shown that emotional words in language are dynamic and have correlations with other grammar semantic roles, i.e., words with semantic meanings, in grammar. Previous methods overlook these two characteristics, which easily lead to misunderstandings of emotions and neglect of key semantics. To address this issue, we propose a dynamical Emotion-Semantic Correlation Model (ESCM) for empathetic dialogue generation tasks. ESCM constructs dynamic emotion-semantic vectors through the interaction of context and emotions. We introduce dependency trees to reflect the correlations between emotions and semantics. Based on dynamic emotion-semantic vectors and dependency trees, we propose a dynamic correlation graph convolutional network to guide the model in learning context meanings in dialogue and generating empathetic responses. Experimental results on the EMPATHETIC-DIALOGUES dataset show that ESCM understands semantics and emotions more accurately and expresses fluent and informative empathetic responses. Our analysis results also indicate that the correlations between emotions and semantics are frequently used in dialogues, which is of great significance for empathetic perception and expression.