arXiv subjects

JinYeong Bak

Publications and source records attributed to JinYeong Bak.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Whose Values, Which Contexts, and What Signals? Grounding Cultural Value Alignment with Re3Culture

Cultural value alignment requires not only model optimization but also a well-specified target grounded in real-human evidence. Yet how such targets should be grounded in human data remains largely unexplored, raising three fundamental questions: (1) whose values should be represented? (2) where should cultural values be observed? and (3) what signals reveal underlying values? We investigate these questions through Re3Culture, a large-scale dataset linking (i) Representative communities: 700+ human participants across four cultures recruited through cultural-affiliation screening and demographic-aware sampling; (ii) Realistic scenario: culturally sensitive scenarios selected by community members, e.g., family and kinship; and (iii) Revealed value signals: 1,400+ value surveys, 20,000+ topic-grounded behavioral principles and explicit value priorities with responses for 6,000+ situated questions. Our analysis shows why these choices matter for defining the target, with three implications. First, estimating cultural values requires both community affiliation and broad internal coverage. Substituting other cultures or restricting subgroup coverage shifts value estimates. LLM simulations also disproportionately reflect particular subgroups. Second, values must be observed in concrete, community-guided situations. Abstract questionnaire profiles weakly recover situated priorities, and communities differ in which scenarios they identify as culturally value-revealing. Third, value priorities should be elicited explicitly, not learned from response preferences or bottom-line answers alone. Preferences conflate value agreement with other response-level qualities, and similar answers can be derived from different value priorities. By addressing these requirements, Re3Culture provides the first human-grounded resource that explicitly informs target definition for cultural value alignment.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Improving Proactive AI Assistance with Hierarchical Procedural Understanding

Proactive AI assistants continuously observe a user's activity and decide whether to provide new guidance or remain silent. They should provide appropriate guidance for the task, determine when to provide the next guidance based on task progress, and adjust the guidance level to the user's expertise and needs. Supporting these capabilities requires training and evaluation data that reflect procedural structure and capture how guidance should adapt to task progress and user needs. However, existing datasets either focus on detection-based proactive understanding or provide procedural guidance at a fixed granularity. Fixed-granularity guidance provides limited information about fine-grained progress and broader procedural context, making it difficult to determine completion and adapt guidance granularity. To address these limitations, we introduce the ProactiveCoach suite, comprising ProactiveCoach-Instruct for training, ProactiveCoachBench for evaluation, and fine-tuned VLMs with an adaptive guidance system. ProactiveCoach-Instruct provides hierarchically structured guidance at the phase, step, and action levels for learning task progress and procedural context. ProactiveCoachBench evaluates whether models provide appropriate guidance at the right time across different guidance levels and adapt when the requested level changes. We fine-tune pretrained VLMs on ProactiveCoach-Instruct and demonstrate its effectiveness across backbones. Compared with fixed-granularity supervision, hierarchical supervision improves overall performance across backbones by up to 9.6%p. We further build an adaptive guidance system by combining our fine-tuned model with a lightweight guidance router. Without additional fine-tuning, our system outperforms the in-context adaptation baseline by 57.1%p across four guidance-level transitions. Our project page is available at https://jinsuby.github.io/ProactiveCoach/.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

CultureConverse: A Multilingual Multi-turn Simulation Harness for Culturally Grounded Assistance in East and Southeast Asia

Current cultural evaluations for large language models (LLMs) often reduce culture to single-turn factual recall via MCQs, failing to capture a common use case: users seeking practical help over multiple turns in culturally grounded scenarios. We introduce CultureConverse, a scalable, multilingual simulation and evaluation harness for culturally grounded assistant dialogue that covers 10 East and Southeast Asian regions, 58 subgroup identities, and 7 domains. Each simulated and evaluated episode produces a scored interaction where the assistant assists the user and infers cultural constraints from partial information. The resulting CultureConverse-DS dataset contains 14,610 benchmark (evaluation) episodes and 274,295 oracle-guided (gold-mode) dialogues. In our benchmark evaluation of 18 models, GPT-5 mini achieves the highest assistance quality. Human annotation experiments suggest that our evaluation framework is a sufficient proxy for human judgment. Performance gains from fine-tuning on 27,860 high-quality CultureConverse-DS samples improve in-domain assistance and transfer out-of-domain to cultural MCQ and safety classification benchmarks. We release the harness, both splits, and judge prompts to support interactive evaluation of cultural competency.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

When2Think: Learning When and How Much to Reason

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) often overthink easy problems and underthink hard ones, leading to inefficient computation allocation. Existing methods regulate generated computation or select between direct answering and explicit reasoning, but do not jointly control whether}to reason and how much computation to allocate within reasoning. We call the resulting difficulty-dependent loss in accuracy under computation reduction the efficiency tax. We propose When2Think, an RLVR-based post-training framework for instance-adaptive computation allocation. Its core mechanism, Instance-level Difficulty-Aware Control (IDAC), uses cached reference statistics of success and token cost to modulate a correctness-gated efficiency bonus based on generated token count. Importance sampling supports exploration of Think and NoThink, while Batch-Wise Standardization constructs standardized advantages for critic-free optimization. The framework requires neither a learned reward model nor a learned critic, and offline reference caching avoids online reference-model queries during policy updates. On AIME24, When2Think improves Pass@3 by 10.0 percentage points while reducing token usage by 27.9% relative to the backbone.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

BoundInk: Boundary-Aware Online Handwriting Generation

Realistic online handwriting depends not only on individual character shapes, but also on how a writer connects, spaces, and aligns adjacent characters. Existing methods rely primarily on long-range sequence modeling and capture these inter-character behaviors only implicitly. This often produces plausible glyphs accompanied by broken cursive joins, inconsistent spacing, or writer-inconsistent transitions. We introduce BoundInk, a writer-conditioned framework that treats inter-character boundaries as explicit generation units. By jointly modeling local transitions and surrounding text context, BoundInk preserves writer-specific glyph appearance while improving connectivity and spacing across complete text lines. We further introduce a boundary-aware evaluation framework that directly assesses cursive continuity and spatial relationships between characters beyond conventional trajectory similarity. Across three benchmark-matched settings, BoundInk improves all applicable boundary-quality measures and reduces normalized dynamic time warping by 17.6--47.8%. In blind human evaluations, BoundInk outputs are preferred in 78.0--82.6% of valid criterion-wise judgments.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Q-TIE: A Lightweight and Generalizable Re-ranking Framework for Temporal Information Retrieval

Temporal Information Retrieval (TIR) has been increasingly critical given the rise of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). Since temporally mismatched evidence can be highly misleading, TIR aims to retrieve documents that are both semantically and temporally relevant to a query. Two TIR paradigms have emerged - temporal retrievers and temporal re-rankers - differing in how temporal relevance is modeled. While these paradigms provide complementary strengths, our analysis reveals that each alone falls short of robust TIR: temporal retrievers provide flexible query understanding via learned representations, but often fail to explicitly account for temporal constraints; temporal re-rankers can enforce such constraints more explicitly, but often rely on predefined re-ranking rules. To address this, we propose Q-TIE, a re-ranking framework based on learned Temporal Intent Extraction (TIE). By introducing a TIE model that maps each query's temporal constraint into a unified interval representation (i.e., $\langle t_{start}, t_{end} \rangle$), Q-TIE generalizes beyond predefined rules via model-based learning while explicitly modeling temporal constraints as a separate signal - jointly achieving what each paradigm typically trades off. Experiments demonstrate that Q-TIE consistently outperforms existing TIR methods with stronger generalizability across temporal query types, and provides a lightweight yet effective add-on for temporally-aware RAG pipelines. Code: https://github.com/ssoy0701/Q-TIE.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

When Noise Fabricates Bias: The Fragility of LLM-as-a-Judge Bias Measurement under Noisy Text

Large language models are increasingly used as judges to measure social bias in text, yet the passages they judge are often noisy, containing typos, informal spelling, and broken punctuation. The consequences of such surface noise for social bias measurement remain unclear. To investigate this question, we apply five realistic noise conditions at multiple intensity levels to 3,822 stereotype-related responses and compare the resulting bias judgments with those on the original text. We find that such surface noise does not degrade bias measurement symmetrically: it is far more likely to turn neutral judgments into biased ones than biased judgments into neutral ones, by up to a 120x margin. We further observe two non-obvious effects across four LLM judges: in the most fragile judge the distortion is at its purest at mild, realistic noise levels, where erasure is scarcest, and as judges grow robust it attenuates toward parity rather than reversing. Bias measured on noisy text is therefore systematically overestimated, most in the categories that matter most for fairness.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

PTCG: Persona-guided Tree-based Counterargument Generation

The ability to generate counterarguments is important for critical thinking and balanced discourse, yet existing approaches typically produce only a single counterargument, failing to capture the diversity and persuasiveness required in real-world debates. To address this limitation, we propose Persona-guided Tree-based Counterargument Generation (PTCG), a framework that combines Tree-of-Thoughts-inspired step-wise generation and pruning with speaker persona selection. By estimating the author's persona from the original argument and incorporating speaker personas representing distinct perspectives, PTCG operationalizes perspective-taking and enables the generation of diverse counterarguments. Results from LLM-as-a-Judge, classifier-based assessment, and human evaluations indicate that PTCG shows consistent improvements in both the diversity and persuasiveness of counterarguments compared to baseline methods.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

CHARM: Character Hallucination for Multicultural Role Play Benchmark

Role-playing large language models (LLMs) are expected to adopt a character's style while also respecting that character's knowledge boundaries. Prior evaluations detect character hallucination but rarely distinguish whether errors arise from failure to recognize a boundary or from failure to comply despite recognition. We introduce CHARM, a multicultural benchmark of 40 real and fictional characters drawn from five cultural-linguistic regions, and validated by native reviewers. It probes two boundary types, Temporal (historical vs. modern) and Cross-Universe (entities outside a character's narrative or historical universe), using abstention-enabled multiple-choice questions. We propose a two-stage evaluation that separates Boundary-Awareness (explicit recognition that a query is out of scope) from Boundary-Compliance (abstention when answering concrete questions). Evaluations across six LLMs show that hallucination is driven predominantly by compliance failures. Models frequently acknowledge that a query lies outside the character's knowledge yet still provide factual, out-of-character answers. By re-posing the same questions to the target character, we confirm that a large fraction of these cases are verified parametric overrides; the model stores the relevant fact but fails to suppress it. We also observe systematic cultural variation in these failures, consistent with imbalances in how characters from different regions are represented in model knowledge.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Camellia: Benchmarking Cultural Biases in LLMs for Asian Languages

As Large Language Models (LLMs) develop stronger multilingual capabilities, their sensitivity to culturally diverse entities becomes increasingly important. Prior work by Naous et al. (2024) has shown that LLMs often favor Western-associated entities in Arabic. Due to the lack of entity-centric multilingual benchmarks, it remains unclear if such biases also manifest in various non-Western languages. In this paper, we introduce Camellia, a benchmark for evaluating entity-centric cultural biases in nine Asian languages, spanning six Asian cultures. Camellia includes 19,530 manually annotated entities associated with the covered Asian or Western cultures, as well as 2,173 masked contexts for these entities derived from social media posts. Using Camellia, we evaluate cultural biases in four recent multilingual LLMs across three tasks: cultural context adaptation, sentiment association, and entity extractive QA. Our analyses show that LLMs struggle with cultural adaptation across these languages, with performance differing across models developed in different regions. We further observe that different LLM families can hold distinct biases, reflected in the ways they link cultures to particular sentiments. Lastly, we find that LLMs can struggle with context understanding in some Asian languages, creating performance gaps between cultures in entity extraction.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

CoCoA: Context-Conditional Cultural Alignment for Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) often favor Western-associated entities across cultural contexts. Conventional debiasing methods aim for uniform neutrality, but cultural bias mitigation demands context-conditional behavior, preferring culturally appropriate entities when cultural cues are present and remaining neutral when they are absent. We propose CoCoA (Context-Conditional Cultural Alignment), a framework that learns this behavior through dual-context training on the same entity pairs under contexts with and without cultural cues. CoCoA combines a contrastive alignment objective with calibration and drift regularization, optimized through goal-aware gradient reconciliation. We evaluate CoCoA on CAMeL and Camellia, two entity-centric cultural bias benchmarks, across ten language settings and four LLMs. CoCoA reduces the Cultural Bias Score from 43 to 24 on average while maintaining near-neutral preferences at 50.2, with minimal impact on general performance across five standard benchmarks. These findings highlight that effective cultural alignment requires context-conditional modeling rather than uniform debiasing, and establish a new direction for mitigating entity-centric cultural bias in LLMs.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Evidence-Consistent Generative Detection under Scenario-Level Distribution Shift

Conventional in-distribution evaluation can overestimate robustness when training and test data share recurring task-specific patterns or surface cues. This risk is especially relevant in social-engineering fraud detection, where attackers can preserve malicious intent while changing the scenario, impersonated entity, or wording. We study this problem as scenario-level out-of-distribution (SL-OOD) detection for SMS and voice phishing, where entire attack scenarios are held out from training while the label space remains fixed. This setting tests whether models can generalize to unseen attack scenarios using decision-relevant evidence rather than familiar scenario-specific cues. Using this SL-OOD evaluation, we find that high in-distribution performance does not reliably predict held-out robustness across feature-, encoder-, and decoder-based baselines. We interpret this gap as scenario memorization: reliance on recurring scenario-specific lexical or entity cues rather than decision-relevant evidence. We propose ECoG, an evidence-consistent generative framework that combines evidence-span supervision with a rationale-label consistency objective during training. On the 0.5B decoder, relative to the same backbone trained without consistency regularization, ECoG raises Macro-F1 on OOD challenging instances by 3.22 points, reduces the share of predictions whose generated rationale supports the opposite label by 4.22 points, and increases token-level overlap with reference evidence spans by 8.38 points; the reduction in prediction-rationale inconsistency is consistent across four decoder backbones. These results suggest that compact generative detectors can benefit from evidence supervision and rationale-label consistency under social-engineering shift.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

MindTailor: Personalized Emotional Support via Post History-Grounded Case Formulation and Collaborative Refinement

As mental health concerns continue to rise globally, social media has emerged as a vital space where individuals seek emotional support. While prior work on personalized emotional support has leveraged seekers' emotional states, personas, and situational context, these approaches primarily capture the seeker's current state, overlooking the formative experiences that shape present concerns. In this work, we propose MindTailor, a framework that generates personalized emotional support responses by constructing a case formulation from the seeker's post history and iteratively refining responses through collaborative critique among counselor agents grounded in distinct counseling strategies. To enable research on this history-aware task, we construct ReddiSupp, a dataset of 798 Reddit posts paired with seekers' prior post histories. Through LLM-as-a-Judge evaluation, expert human evaluation, and a user study with seekers, we demonstrate that MindTailor outperforms baselines across these evaluations, improving empathy, personalization, understanding, and achieving the highest overall preference.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

The Road to Artificial SuperIntelligence: A Comprehensive Survey of Superalignment

The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has sparked discussion on Artificial Superintelligence (ASI), a hypothetical AI system that surpasses human intelligence. Although ASI remains hypothetical and far beyond current AI capabilities, discussing its potential and exploring its feasibility and potential risks is critical for the development of future AI systems. The idea of superalignment originates from scalable oversight, which studies how to supervise increasingly capable AI systems when direct human supervision becomes insufficient. In this paper, we focus on the superalignment problem: "The process of supervising, controlling, and governing artificial superintelligence." We first review scalable oversight paradigms-Sandwiching, Self-Enhancement, and Weak-to-Strong Generalization -- then analyze the limitations of current paradigms through the lens of possibility and impossibility, discuss key challenges, and propose pathways for the safe and continual improvement of future AI systems.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Temporal Preference Optimization for Unsupervised Retrieval

Unsupervised dense retrievers offer scalability by learning semantic similarity from unlabeled documents via contrastive learning, but they struggle to capture the temporal relevance, retrieving semantically related but temporally misaligned documents-an important aspect when a document collection spans multiple time periods (e.g., retrieving documents from 2018-2025 for "Who is the president in 2019?" introduces temporal ambiguity). Existing methods rely on supervised training with explicit timestamps, which are not always feasible. We propose TPOUR (Temporal Preference Optimization for Unsupervised Retriever), which uses our novel training method Temporal Retrieval Preference Optimization (TRPO). TRPO reinterprets preference learning in the temporal dimension, guiding the retriever to favor temporally aligned documents. TPOUR further generalizes to unseen time periods via interpolation in a learned time embedding, enabling continuous temporal alignment. Experiments on temporal information retrieval (T-IR), TPOUR outperforms both unsupervised and supervised baselines. Compared to Qwen-Embedding-8B, despite being about 72.7x smaller, TPOUR Contriever improves average nDCG@5 by +4.04 (+12.15%) on explicit and +4.98 (+15.21%) on implicit queries. We provide our code at https://github.com/agwaBom/TPOUR.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2026

Distributional Open-Ended Evaluation of LLM Cultural Value Alignment Based on Value Codebook

As LLMs are globally deployed, aligning their cultural value orientations is critical for safety and user engagement. However, existing benchmarks face the Construct-Composition-Context ($C^3$) challenge: relying on discriminative, multiple-choice formats that probe value knowledge rather than true orientations, overlook subcultural heterogeneity, and mismatch with real-world open-ended generation. We introduce DOVE, a distributional evaluation framework that directly compares human-written text distributions with LLM-generated outputs. DOVE utilizes a rate-distortion variational optimization objective to construct a compact value codebook from 10K documents, mapping text into a structured value space to filter semantic noise. Alignment is measured using unbalanced optimal transport, capturing intra-cultural distributional structures and subgroup diversity. Experiments across 12 LLMs show that DOVE achieves superior predictive validity, attaining a 31.56% correlation with downstream tasks, while maintaining high reliability with as few as 500 samples per culture.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Research Superalignment Should Advance Now with Alternating Competence and Conformity Optimization

The recent leap in AI capabilities, driven by big generative models, has sparked the possibility of achieving Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and further triggered discussions on Artificial Superintelligence (ASI)-a system surpassing all humans across measured domains. This gives rise to the critical research question of: As we approach ASI, how do we align it with human values, ensuring it benefits rather than harms human society, a.k.a., the Superalignment problem. Despite ASI being regarded by many as a hypothetical concept, in this position paper, we argue that superalignment is achievable and research on it should advance immediately, through simultaneous and alternating optimization of task competence and value conformity. We posit that superalignment is not merely a safeguard for ASI but also necessary for its responsible realization. To support this position, we first provide a formal definition of superalignment rooted in the gap between capability and capacity, delve into its perceived infeasibility by analyzing the limitations of existing paradigms, and then illustrate a conceptual path of superalignment to support its achievability, centered on two fundamental principles. This work frames a potential initiative for developing value-aligned next-generation AI in the future, which will garner greater benefits and reduce potential harm to humanity.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Talking with Tables for Better LLM Factual Data Interactions

Large Language Models (LLMs) often struggle with requests related to information retrieval and data manipulation that frequently arise in real-world scenarios under multiple conditions. In this paper, we demonstrate that leveraging tabular structures in LLM interactions, is more effective than utilizing other structures for handling prevalent requests that operate over factual data. Through comprehensive evaluations across various scenarios and request types, we show that providing tabular structures yields a 40.29\% average performance gain along with better robustness and token efficiency. Through attention-value analysis, we discover that tables help LLMs better locate relevant information, explaining these improvements. Beyond tables and text, we evaluate whether (1) blending structuredness within text, such as providing templates or fixing the order of attributes, and (2) other representative structures, such as knowledge graphs and JSON are helpful. We observe that utilizing tables offers the best balance between efficiency and effectiveness. The method remains robust to task complexity and adapts to unstructured sources through text-to-table conversion. Overall, we highlight the untapped potential of tabular representations for future LLM applications.

cs.AI↗