Year: 2025
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: Designing effective LLMs for social influence (SI) tasks demands controlling linguistic output such that it adapts to context (such as user attributes, history etc.) while upholding ethical guardrails.Standard Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods like LoRA struggle to manage the trade-off between adaptive linguistic expression and safety, and optimize based on overall objectives without differentiating the functional roles of internal model components.Therefore, we introduce Probing-Guided PEFT (PG-PEFT), a novel fine-tuning strategy which utilizes interpretability probes to identify LLM components associated with context-driven linguistic variations versus those linked to safety violations (e.g., toxicity, bias).This functional map then guides LoRA updates, enabling more targeted control over the model's linguistic output.We evaluate PG-PEFT on SI tasks (persuasion, negotiation) and linguistic adaptability with safety benchmarks against standard PEFT.
Authors: Avni Mittal, Sree Hari Nagaralu, Sandipan Dandapat
Language: English
Subfield: Safety Research
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
OpenAlex ID: W4412944159