Fan Yang

h-index1
2papers
1citation

2 Papers

9.8HCMar 25
"I Use ChatGPT to Humanize My Words": Affordances and Risks of ChatGPT to Autistic Users

Renkai Ma, Ben Zefeng Zhang, Chen Chen et al.

Large Language Model (LLM) chatbots like ChatGPT have emerged as cognitive scaffolding for autistic users, yet the tension between their utility and risk remains under-articulated. Through an inductive thematic analysis of 3,984 social media posts by self-identified autistic users, we apply a technology affordance lens to examine this duality. We found that while users leveraged ChatGPT to offload executive dysfunction, regulate emotions, translate neurotypical communication, and validate their autistic identity, these affordances coexist with risks to their well-being: reinforcing delusional thinking, erasing authentic identity through automated masking, and triggering conflicts with the autistic sense of justice. As part of our preliminary work, this poster identifies trade-offs in autistic users' interactions with ChatGPT and concludes by outlining our future work on developing neuro-inclusive technologies that address these tensions through beneficial friction, bidirectional translation, and the delineation of emotional validation from reality.

4.4AIJan 25
Neuro-Symbolic Verification on Instruction Following of LLMs

Yiming Su, Kunzhao Xu, Yanjie Gao et al.

A fundamental problem of applying Large Language Models (LLMs) to important applications is that LLMs do not always follow instructions, and violations are often hard to observe or check. In LLM-based agentic workflows, such violations can propagate and amplify along reasoning chains, causing task failures and system incidents. This paper presents NSVIF, a neuro-symbolic framework for verifying whether an LLM's output follows the instructions used to prompt the LLM. NSVIF is a universal, general-purpose verifier; it makes no assumption about the instruction or the LLM. NSVIF formulates instruction-following verification as a constraint-satisfaction problem by modeling user instructions as constraints. NSVIF models both logical and semantic constraints; constraint solving is done by a unified solver that orchestrates logical reasoning and semantic analysis. To evaluate NSVIF, we develop VIFBENCH, a new benchmark for instruction-following verifiers with fine-grained data labels. Experiments show that NSVIF significantly outperforms LLM-based approaches and provides interpretable feedback. We also show that feedback from NSVIF helps improve LLMs' instruction-following capability without post-training.