Hayoung Jung

Chan Young Park, Shuyue Stella Li, Hayoung Jung et al. · cmu, uw

This study introduces ValueScope, a framework leveraging language models to quantify social norms and values within online communities, grounded in social science perspectives on normative structures. We employ ValueScope to dissect and analyze linguistic and stylistic expressions across 13 Reddit communities categorized under gender, politics, science, and finance. Our analysis provides a quantitative foundation showing that even closely related communities exhibit remarkably diverse norms. This diversity supports existing theories and adds a new dimension--community preference--to understanding community interactions. ValueScope not only delineates differing social norms among communities but also effectively traces their evolution and the influence of significant external events like the U.S. presidential elections and the emergence of new sub-communities. The framework thus highlights the pivotal role of social norms in shaping online interactions, presenting a substantial advance in both the theory and application of social norm studies in digital spaces.

Hayoung Jung, Prerna Juneja, Tanushree Mitra · uw

Despite being an integral tool for finding health-related information online, YouTube has faced criticism for disseminating COVID-19 misinformation globally to its users. Yet, prior audit studies have predominantly investigated YouTube within the Global North contexts, often overlooking the Global South. To address this gap, we conducted a comprehensive 10-day geolocation-based audit on YouTube to compare the prevalence of COVID-19 misinformation in search results between the United States (US) and South Africa (SA), the countries heavily affected by the pandemic in the Global North and the Global South, respectively. For each country, we selected 3 geolocations and placed sock-puppets, or bots emulating "real" users, that collected search results for 48 search queries sorted by 4 search filters for 10 days, yielding a dataset of 915K results. We found that 31.55% of the top-10 search results contained COVID-19 misinformation. Among the top-10 search results, bots in SA faced significantly more misinformative search results than their US counterparts. Overall, our study highlights the contrasting algorithmic behaviors of YouTube search between two countries, underscoring the need for the platform to regulate algorithmic behavior consistently across different regions of the Globe.

Max Springer, Chung Peng Lee, Blossom Metevier et al.

Fine-tuning aligned language models on benign tasks unpredictably degrades safety guardrails, even when training data contains no harmful content and developers have no adversarial intent. We show that the prevailing explanation, that fine-tuning updates should be orthogonal to safety-critical directions in high-dimensional parameter space, offers false reassurance: we show this orthogonality is structurally unstable and collapses under the dynamics of gradient descent. We then resolve this through a novel geometric analysis, proving that alignment concentrates in low-dimensional subspaces with sharp curvature, creating a brittle structure that first-order methods cannot detect or defend. While initial fine-tuning updates may indeed avoid these subspaces, the curvature of the fine-tuning loss generates second-order acceleration that systematically steers trajectories into alignment-sensitive regions. We formalize this mechanism through the Alignment Instability Condition, three geometric properties that, when jointly satisfied, lead to safety degradation. Our main result establishes a quartic scaling law: alignment loss grows with the fourth power of training time, governed by the sharpness of alignment geometry and the strength of curvature coupling between the fine-tuning task and safety-critical parameters. These results expose a structural blind spot in the current safety paradigm. The dominant approaches to safe fine-tuning address only the initial snapshot of a fundamentally dynamic problem. Alignment fragility is not a bug to be patched; it is an intrinsic geometric property of gradient descent on curved manifolds. Our results motivate the development of curvature-aware methods, and we hope will further enable a shift in alignment safety analysis from reactive red-teaming to predictive diagnostics for open-weight model deployment.

Preetam Prabhu Srikar Dammu, Hayoung Jung, Anjali Singh et al. · uw

Large language models (LLMs) have emerged as an integral part of modern societies, powering user-facing applications such as personal assistants and enterprise applications like recruitment tools. Despite their utility, research indicates that LLMs perpetuate systemic biases. Yet, prior works on LLM harms predominantly focus on Western concepts like race and gender, often overlooking cultural concepts from other parts of the world. Additionally, these studies typically investigate "harm" as a singular dimension, ignoring the various and subtle forms in which harms manifest. To address this gap, we introduce the Covert Harms and Social Threats (CHAST), a set of seven metrics grounded in social science literature. We utilize evaluation models aligned with human assessments to examine the presence of covert harms in LLM-generated conversations, particularly in the context of recruitment. Our experiments reveal that seven out of the eight LLMs included in this study generated conversations riddled with CHAST, characterized by malign views expressed in seemingly neutral language unlikely to be detected by existing methods. Notably, these LLMs manifested more extreme views and opinions when dealing with non-Western concepts like caste, compared to Western ones such as race.

Hayoung Jung, Shravika Mittal, Ananya Aatreya et al. · gatech, uw

Understanding the prevalence of misinformation in health topics online can inform public health policies and interventions. However, measuring such misinformation at scale remains a challenge, particularly for high-stakes but understudied topics like opioid-use disorder (OUD)--a leading cause of death in the U.S. We present the first large-scale study of OUD-related myths on YouTube, a widely-used platform for health information. With clinical experts, we validate 8 pervasive myths and release an expert-labeled video dataset. To scale labeling, we introduce MythTriage, an efficient triage pipeline that uses a lightweight model for routine cases and defers harder ones to a high-performing, but costlier, large language model (LLM). MythTriage achieves up to 0.86 macro F1-score while estimated to reduce annotation time and financial cost by over 76% compared to experts and full LLM labeling. We analyze 2.9K search results and 343K recommendations, uncovering how myths persist on YouTube and offering actionable insights for public health and platform moderation.

Navreet Kaur, Hoda Ayad, Hayoung Jung et al. · gatech, uw

Language model users often embed personal and social context in their questions. The asker's role -- implicit in how the question is framed -- creates specific needs for an appropriate response. However, most evaluations, while capturing the model's capability to respond, often ignore who is asking. This gap is especially critical in stigmatized domains such as opioid use disorder (OUD), where accounting for users' contexts is essential to provide accessible, stigma-free responses. We propose CoRUS (COmmunity-driven Roles for User-centric Question Simulation), a framework for simulating role-based questions. Drawing on role theory and posts from an online OUD recovery community (r/OpiatesRecovery), we first build a taxonomy of asker roles -- patients, caregivers, practitioners. Next, we use it to simulate 15,321 questions that embed each role's goals, behaviors, and experiences. Our evaluations show that these questions are both highly believable and comparable to real-world data. When used to evaluate five LLMs, for the same question but differing roles, we find systematic differences: vulnerable roles, such as patients and caregivers, elicit more supportive responses (+17%) and reduced knowledge content (-19%) in comparison to practitioners. Our work demonstrates how implicitly signaling a user's role shapes model responses, and provides a methodology for role-informed evaluation of conversational AI.

Mahika Phutane, Hayoung Jung, Matthew Kim et al. · uw

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly under scrutiny for perpetuating identity-based discrimination in high-stakes domains such as hiring, particularly against people with disabilities (PwD). However, existing research remains largely Western-centric, overlooking how intersecting forms of marginalization--such as gender and caste--shape experiences of PwD in the Global South. We conduct a comprehensive audit of six LLMs across 2,820 hiring scenarios spanning diverse disability, gender, nationality, and caste profiles. To capture subtle intersectional harms and biases, we introduce ABLEIST (Ableism, Inspiration, Superhumanization, and Tokenism), a set of five ableism-specific and three intersectional harm metrics grounded in disability studies literature. Our results reveal significant increases in ABLEIST harms towards disabled candidates--harms that many state-of-the-art models failed to detect. These harms were further amplified by sharp increases in intersectional harms (e.g., Tokenism) for gender and caste-marginalized disabled candidates, highlighting critical blind spots in current safety tools and the need for intersectional safety evaluations of frontier models in high-stakes domains like hiring.