Pinxian Lu

h-index16
2papers

2 Papers

AIOct 16, 2025Code
Echoes of Human Malice in Agents: Benchmarking LLMs for Multi-Turn Online Harassment Attacks

Trilok Padhi, Pinxian Lu, Abdulkadir Erol et al.

Large Language Model (LLM) agents are powering a growing share of interactive web applications, yet remain vulnerable to misuse and harm. Prior jailbreak research has largely focused on single-turn prompts, whereas real harassment often unfolds over multi-turn interactions. In this work, we present the Online Harassment Agentic Benchmark consisting of: (i) a synthetic multi-turn harassment conversation dataset, (ii) a multi-agent (e.g., harasser, victim) simulation informed by repeated game theory, (iii) three jailbreak methods attacking agents across memory, planning, and fine-tuning, and (iv) a mixed-methods evaluation framework. We utilize two prominent LLMs, LLaMA-3.1-8B-Instruct (open-source) and Gemini-2.0-flash (closed-source). Our results show that jailbreak tuning makes harassment nearly guaranteed with an attack success rate of 95.78--96.89% vs. 57.25--64.19% without tuning in Llama, and 99.33% vs. 98.46% without tuning in Gemini, while sharply reducing refusal rate to 1-2% in both models. The most prevalent toxic behaviors are Insult with 84.9--87.8% vs. 44.2--50.8% without tuning, and Flaming with 81.2--85.1% vs. 31.5--38.8% without tuning, indicating weaker guardrails compared to sensitive categories such as sexual or racial harassment. Qualitative evaluation further reveals that attacked agents reproduce human-like aggression profiles, such as Machiavellian/psychopathic patterns under planning, and narcissistic tendencies with memory. Counterintuitively, closed-source and open-source models exhibit distinct escalation trajectories across turns, with closed-source models showing significant vulnerability. Overall, our findings show that multi-turn and theory-grounded attacks not only succeed at high rates but also mimic human-like harassment dynamics, motivating the development of robust safety guardrails to ultimately keep online platforms safe and responsible.

SINov 28, 2025
Effectively Detecting and Responding to Online Harassment with Large Language Models

Pinxian Lu, Nimra Ishfaq, Emma Win et al.

Online harassment has been a persistent issue in the online space. Predominantly, research focused on online harassment in public social media platforms, while less is placed on private messaging platforms. To address online harassment on one private messaging platform, Instagram, we leverage the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). To achieve this, we recruited human labelers to identify online harassment in an Instagram messages dataset. Using the previous conversation as context, we utilize an LLM pipeline to conduct large-scale labeling on Instagram messages and evaluate its performance against human labels. Then, we use LLM to generate and evaluate simulated responses to online harassment messages. We find that the LLM labeling pipeline is capable of identifying online harassment in private messages. By comparing human responses and simulated responses, we also demonstrate that our simulated responses are superior in helpfulness compared to original human responses.