Papers for
moderation teams
Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.
BanglaShield improves safety detection across Bangla scripts and code-mixing
BanglaShield: A Script-Robust Safety Classifier and Benchmark for Bangla Native, Romanized, and Code-Mixed Prompts
Abstract: Safety classifiers for large language models (LLMs) are typically built and evaluated on standard-script text, yet Bangla, like many lower-resource languages, is routinely written in native script, in Latin-script romanization, and code-mixed with English, Hindi, or Urdu. We introduce BanglaShield, a resource and model for graded prompt-safety classification across these written forms. We consolidate 10,245 Bangla prompts from six sources under a four-level taxonomy (Safe, Offensive, Harmful, Severe) and render each prompt in three aligned forms that share labels and a group-aware split, enabling strictly paired comparisons. Benchmarking six contemporary LLMs, including a Bangla-specialized one, on 36,882 classification queries and 24,318 judged responses, we find that LLM classifiers label 47.0% of unsafe native-script prompts as Safe, rising to 63.4% under romanization, while response-level safety accuracy drops by 10.3 points. Three multilingual guard models also pass 30.3-57.3% of unsafe native-script prompts. Using a model's own classification as an input filter reduces harmful compliance by only about five points. In contrast, BanglaShield, a compact fine-tuned encoder, reaches 87.8 macro-F1 on native-script and 84.4 on romanized prompts, outperforming the best LLM on each form by 42.8-46.1 points with ~130x fewer parameters than Gemma 4 31B. We release the corpus, splits, judgments, and model.
PatchBench measures precise safety fixes in large language models
PatchBench: Measuring Collateral Damage in Activation Patching
Abstract: An LLM safety patch can pass a benchmark while still being a poor repair. This risk is especially acute for jailbreak repairs, where the goal is to correct a specific unsafe behaviour without changing unrelated behaviours. A patch may block exact evaluation prompts yet fail on close harmful variants, or suppress harmful behaviour by over-refusing benign prompts that share its wording or structure. Existing protocols primarily test whether models can be broken, while aggregate metrics (attack success, refusal rates, global capability) cannot distinguish selective repairs from broader local suppression. To address this gap, we introduce PatchBench, a benchmark of empirically observed model-specific jailbreak failures inducing actionable harmful answers. Starting from 27,870 prompts from 37 public datasets, we curate 15,314 English prompts and query 8 open-source instruction-tuned models. Combining WildGuard filtering, pairwise Elo ranking, and manual verification, we retain a curated bank of 400 high-confidence jailbreak failures. We further introduce PatchBench-Local, an evaluation protocol testing whether a patch is behaviourally precise. For each harmful source prompt, PatchBench-Local generates three families of local neighbours: harmful variants preserving malicious intent, benign prompts with matched structure, and benign prompts reusing key harmful terms. It evaluates harmful-neighbour correction and benign-neighbour preservation, distinguishing selective repair from broader local suppression. Evaluating four activation steering methods with PatchBench-Local and MMLU shows that global capability can remain nearly unchanged while local benign regressions are severe, confirming aggregate metrics miss important collateral damage. PatchBench-Local provides a more precise basis for developing and comparing jailbreak repair methods.
Long context llms still struggle to follow social threads online
LongSocialBench: Do Long-Context LLMs Understand Online Discussion Threads?
Abstract: Long-context LLMs can now ingest entire online discussion threads, but understanding their social discourse requires more than reading a long document: models must track parent-reply relations, turning points, scoped subtrees, cross-branch contrasts, and participant trajectories. To test this structure-aware social reasoning, we introduce LongSocialBench, a benchmark of 1,462 verified human-authored multiple-choice items drawn from 94 complete Hacker News, Stack Exchange, and Reddit r/ChangeMyView episodes, with a median length of approximately 73K tokens. Each item pairs a complete serialized discussion and reply structure with a four-option question, requiring models to recover structured social evidence. Released items are verified for answerability, option uniqueness, and evidence grounding. Across 18 models and 29 evaluation settings, current long-context workflows remain far below human performance. The best individual result comes from Claude-Opus-4.7, which reaches 63.0% when prompted to eliminate incorrect options before answering, compared with 72.4% for independent human readers. Averaged across all 18 models, the full-context Baseline scores 43.9%. Supplying the gold evidence scope raises this to 55.0%, showing that substantial errors remain even after the relevant thread region is identified. LongSocialBench shows that the missing capability is not context access or prompting alone, but social understanding over structured reply trees.