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Hidden Darkness in LLM-Generated Designs: Exploring Dark Patterns in Ecommerce Web Components Generated by LLMs

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Recent work has highlighted the risks of LLM-generated content for a wide range of harmful behaviors, including incorrect and harmful code. In this work, we extend this by studying whether LLM-generated web design contains dark patterns. This work evaluated designs of ecommerce web components generated by four popular LLMs: Claude, GPT, Gemini, and Llama. We tested 13 commonly used ecommerce components (e.g., search, product reviews) and used them as prompts to generate a total of 312 components across all models. Over one-third of generated components contain at least one dark pattern. The majority of dark pattern strategies involve hiding crucial information, limiting users' actions, and manipulating them into making decisions through a sense of urgency. Dark patterns are also more frequently produced in components that are related to company interests. These findings highlight the need for interventions to prevent dark patterns during front-end code generation with LLMs and emphasize the importance of expanding ethical design education to a broader audience.


What are Models Thinking about? Understanding Large Language Model Hallucinations "Psychology" through Model Inner State Analysis

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Large language model (LLM) systems suffer from the models' unstable ability to generate valid and factual content, resulting in hallucination generation. Current hallucination detection methods heavily rely on out-of-model information sources, such as RAG to assist the detection, thus bringing heavy additional latency. Recently, internal states of LLMs' inference have been widely used in numerous research works, such as prompt injection detection, etc. Considering the interpretability of LLM internal states and the fact that they do not require external information sources, we introduce such states into LLM hallucination detection. In this paper, we systematically analyze different internal states' revealing features during inference forward and comprehensively evaluate their ability in hallucination detection. Specifically, we cut the forward process of a large language model into three stages: understanding, query, generation, and extracting the internal state from these stages. By analyzing these states, we provide a deep understanding of why the hallucinated content is generated and what happened in the internal state of the models. Then, we introduce these internal states into hallucination detection and conduct comprehensive experiments to discuss the advantages and limitations.


Transferring Textual Preferences to Vision-Language Understanding through Model Merging

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) perform outstandingly across various multimodal tasks. However, their ability to evaluate generated content remains limited, and training vision-language reward models (VLRMs) with preference data is computationally expensive. This paper explores a training-free alternative by merging text-based reward models (RMs) with LVLMs to create VLRMs. Our approach shows that integrating these models leads to improved performance over LVLMs' scoring and text-based RMs, offering an efficient method for incorporating textual preferences into LVLMs.


Astra: Efficient and Money-saving Automatic Parallel Strategies Search on Heterogeneous GPUs

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In this paper, we introduce an efficient and money-saving automatic parallel strategies search framework on heterogeneous GPUs: Astra. First, Astra searches for the efficiency-optimal parallel strategy in both GPU configurations search space (GPU types and GPU numbers) and parallel parameters search space. Then, Astra also provides the solution on heterogeneous GPUs by mathematically modeling the time consumption of heterogeneous training. At last, Astra is the first to propose the automatic parallel strategy search on money-saving. The experiment results demonstrate that Astra can achieve better throughput than expert-designed strategies. The search time cost for Astra can also be limited to 1.27 seconds in a single-GPU setting and less than 1.35 minutes in a heterogeneous-GPU setting on average with an accuracy of over 95%.


Towards Lightweight, Adaptive and Attribute-Aware Multi-Aspect Controllable Text Generation with Large Language Models

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Multi-aspect controllable text generation aims to control text generation in attributes from multiple aspects, making it a complex but powerful task in natural language processing. Supervised fine-tuning methods are often employed for this task due to their simplicity and effectiveness. However, they still have some limitations: low rank adaptation (LoRA) only fine-tunes a few parameters and has suboptimal control effects, while full fine-tuning (FFT) requires significant computational resources and is susceptible to overfitting, particularly when data is limited. Moreover, existing works typically train multi-aspect controllable text generation models using only single-aspect annotated data, which results in discrepancies in data distribution; at the same time, accurately generating text with specific attributes is a challenge that requires strong attribute-aware capabilities. To address these limitations, we propose a lightweight, adaptive and attribute-aware framework for multi-aspect controllable text generation. Our framework can dynamically adjust model parameters according to different aspects of data to achieve controllable text generation, aiming to optimize performance across multiple aspects. Experimental results show that our framework outperforms other strong baselines, achieves state-of-the-art performance, adapts well to data discrepancies, and is more accurate in attribute perception.


FlexDuo: A Pluggable System for Enabling Full-Duplex Capabilities in Speech Dialogue Systems

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Full-Duplex Speech Dialogue Systems (Full-Duplex SDS) have significantly enhanced the naturalness of human-machine interaction by enabling real-time bidirectional communication. However, existing approaches face challenges such as difficulties in independent module optimization and contextual noise interference due to highly coupled architectural designs and oversimplified binary state modeling. This paper proposes FlexDuo, a flexible full-duplex control module that decouples duplex control from spoken dialogue systems through a plug-and-play architectural design. Furthermore, inspired by human information-filtering mechanisms in conversations, we introduce an explicit Idle state. On one hand, the Idle state filters redundant noise and irrelevant audio to enhance dialogue quality. On the other hand, it establishes a semantic integrity-based buffering mechanism, reducing the risk of mutual interruptions while ensuring accurate response transitions. Experimental results on the Fisher corpus demonstrate that FlexDuo reduces the false interruption rate by 24.9% and improves response accuracy by 7.6% compared to integrated full-duplex dialogue system baselines. It also outperforms voice activity detection (VAD) controlled baseline systems in both Chinese and English dialogue quality. The proposed modular architecture and state-based dialogue model provide a novel technical pathway for building flexible and efficient duplex dialogue systems.


HawkBench: Investigating Resilience of RAG Methods on Stratified Information-Seeking Tasks

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In real-world information-seeking scenarios, users have dynamic and diverse needs, requiring RAG systems to demonstrate adaptable resilience. To comprehensively evaluate the resilience of current RAG methods, we introduce HawkBench, a human-labeled, multi-domain benchmark designed to rigorously assess RAG performance across categorized task types. By stratifying tasks based on information-seeking behaviors, HawkBench provides a systematic evaluation of how well RAG systems adapt to diverse user needs. Unlike existing benchmarks, which focus primarily on specific task types (mostly factoid queries) and rely on varying knowledge bases, HawkBench offers: (1) systematic task stratification to cover a broad range of query types, including both factoid and rationale queries, (2) integration of multi-domain corpora across all task types to mitigate corpus bias, and (3) rigorous annotation for high-quality evaluation. HawkBench includes 1,600 high-quality test samples, evenly distributed across domains and task types. Using this benchmark, we evaluate representative RAG methods, analyzing their performance in terms of answer quality and response latency. Our findings highlight the need for dynamic task strategies that integrate decision-making, query interpretation, and global knowledge understanding to improve RAG generalizability. We believe HawkBench serves as a pivotal benchmark for advancing the resilience of RAG methods and their ability to achieve general-purpose information seeking.


Estimating Commonsense Plausibility through Semantic Shifts

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Commonsense plausibility estimation is critical for evaluating language models (LMs), yet existing generative approaches--reliant on likelihoods or verbalized judgments--struggle with fine-grained discrimination. In this paper, we propose ComPaSS, a novel discriminative framework that quantifies commonsense plausibility by measuring semantic shifts when augmenting sentences with commonsense-related information. Plausible augmentations induce minimal shifts in semantics, while implausible ones result in substantial deviations. Evaluations on two types of fine-grained commonsense plausibility estimation tasks across different backbones, including LLMs and vision-language models (VLMs), show that ComPaSS consistently outperforms baselines. It demonstrates the advantage of discriminative approaches over generative methods in fine-grained commonsense plausibility evaluation. Experiments also show that (1) VLMs yield superior performance to LMs, when integrated with ComPaSS, on vision-grounded commonsense tasks. (2) contrastive pre-training sharpens backbone models' ability to capture semantic nuances, thereby further enhancing ComPaSS.


ThinkGuard: Deliberative Slow Thinking Leads to Cautious Guardrails

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Ensuring the safety of large language models (LLMs) is critical as they are deployed in real-world applications. Existing guardrails rely on rule-based filtering or single-pass classification, limiting their ability to handle nuanced safety violations. To address this, we propose ThinkGuard, a critique-augmented guardrail model that distills knowledge from high-capacity LLMs by generating structured critiques alongside safety labels. Fine-tuned on critique-augmented data, the captured deliberative thinking ability drastically enhances the guardrail's cautiousness and interpretability. Evaluated on multiple safety benchmarks, ThinkGuard achieves the highest average F1 and AUPRC, outperforming all baselines. Compared to LLaMA Guard 3, ThinkGuard improves accuracy by 16.1% and macro F1 by 27.0%. Moreover, it surpasses label-only fine-tuned models, confirming that structured critiques enhance both classification precision and nuanced safety reasoning while maintaining computational efficiency.


TreeCut: A Synthetic Unanswerable Math Word Problem Dataset for LLM Hallucination Evaluation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Large language models (LLMs) now achieve near-human performance on standard math word problem benchmarks (e.g., GSM8K), yet their true reasoning ability remains disputed. A key concern is that models often produce confident, yet unfounded, answers to unanswerable problems. We introduce TreeCut, a synthetic dataset that systematically generates infinite unanswerable math word problems and their answerable counterparts, by representing each question as a tree and removing chosen necessary conditions. Experiments show TreeCut effectively induce hallucinations in large language models, including GPT-4o and o3-mini, with rates of 61% and 42% in their respective worst-case scenarios. Further analysis highlights that deeper or more complex trees, composite item names, and removing necessary condition near the middle of a path all increase the likelihood of hallucinations, underscoring the persistent challenges LLMs face in identifying unanswerable math problems.