Thai Le

I am looking for students to do research in responsble/security/XAI for NLP models. If you are interested, please send me your C.V.

09/2024 - Adapters Mixup is accepted to EMNLP 2024!
We use mixup with adapters to fine-tune pre-trained language models to enhance their adversarial robustness with unknown future attacks.
08/2024 - ``No-Matter-XAI'': Explaining Irrelevance of Text Classifers with Alterfactual Examples is available.
07/2024 - Deepfake Text Detection with Topological Analysis is accepted to ECAI 2024!
06/2024 - We delivered our Deepfake Text Detection and Obfuscation at NAACL 2024 (Mexico City) with Penn State, MIT Lincoln Lab and GPT-Zero
06/2024 - Beyond Individual Facts for GPT Models is available
We investigate knowledge locality of GPT models for not one but a group of conceptually related facts.
06/2024 - PlagBench is available.
We collect data and benchmark LLM's dual behaviors: (1) plagarism generation via summarization and (2) plagarism detection.
06/2024 - XAI Similarity Metrics is available.
We investigate a variety of similarity measures designed for text-based adversarial attacks on Explainable AI.
06/2024 - A Ship of Theseus: Curious Cases of Paraphrasing in LLM-Generated Texts (Nafis, Penn State) is accepted to ACL 2024
06/2024 - Searching for the Correlation between Training Data and Adversarial Robustness (Cuong, FPT) is accepted to ACL 2024
06/2024 - Generalizability of Mixture of Domain-Specific Adapters from the Lens of Signed Weight Directions (Tuc, IUB) is accepted to ACL 2024
05/2024 - Mentee Jun (Oxford High School) was awarded 3rd place (SPECIAL AWARD by NSA) at ISEF 2024. Congratulations!
05/2024 - Lisette accepted a research-based MSc program at Wake Forest University with a full-ride scholarship. Congratulations!
04/2024 - Chris passed his doctorate prospectus. Congratulations!
03/2024 - Our paper The Unexpected Effects of Google Smart Compose on Open-Ended Writing Tasks is accepted to AIED 2024
01/2024 - Happy New Year!

From 2023

12/2023 - Rishabh successfully defended his Master thesis. Congratulations!

12/2023 - Our paper ALISON: Fast and Effective Stylometric Authorship Obfuscation accepted to AAAI'24
This paper proposed a simple, fast and effective algorithm to hide or mask true authorships from texts, even ChatGPT generated ones
Congratulations to Eric (PhD at UMD) and Saranya (PhD at PSU)!

11/2023 - Our paper ``Enhancing Brand Affinity in the Face of Political Controversy: the Role of Disclosing AI Moderator on Social Media Platforms'' accepted to AAA'24.
This is a collaborative effort with Maria (Michigan State University) and Marie (Cornell University).
We designed a user-interface to evaluate the effects of AI moderation disclosure on brand affinity.

11/2023 - PC Member: ACL Rolling Review (EACL'24)

11/2023 - Our paper ``The Strange Case of Jekyll and Hyde: Analysis of r/ToastMe and r/RoastMe Users on Reddit'' accepted to ICWSM'24, FINALLY!
This paper analyzes why some people frequently joined both r/ToastMe and r/RoastMe subreddits at the same time.
Congratulations to the team, especially Wooyong (Penn State)!

10/2023 - Our papers are accepted to EMNLP'23. Congratulations to
KInIT and Pike Lab (multilingual neural text detection),

Jason (UMD, preventing privacy leakage in texts on social media),
Nafis (Penn State, written v.s. spoken neural texts) and
Chris (Ole Miss, fooling XAI explanations)!

10/2023 - Our tutorial on deepfake text detection and obfuscation accepted at NAACL'24

09/2023 - Dr. Le participated in the LEVEL UP workshop organized by CRA in Atlanta

08/2023 - ``Does Human Collaboration Enhance the Accuracy of Identifying Deepfake Texts?'' accepted to AAAI HCOMP 2023

08/2023 - Welcome new lab members: Hoang Tran and Tuc Nguyen

07/2023 - Sijan and Chris successfully defended their Master theses. Congratulations!

07/2023 - Our tutorial session on deepfake text detection accepted to 2023 NSF Cybersecurity Summit

07/2023 - PC Member: AAAI'24

07/2023 - Invited guest-lecturer at REU@PSU. Happy to see old/new faces at Penn State!

07/2023 - Paper on Explaining RL agents via policy-graph+NLP+counterfactual abstractions is accepted to AAMAS Journal

06/2023 - Preprint of XAIFooler - fooling AI explanations on text classifiers is available.

05/2023 - Congratulations to mentee Jason Zijao (PhD at UMD), Eric Xing (PhD at WashU), Jayesh Khandelwal (MS at NYU) on graduate admissions.

03/2023 - Preprint of NoisyHate - an adversarial toxic texts dataset with human-written perturbations is available

01/2023 - Paper on the plagiarism behaviors of LLM is accepted to WWW'23

01/2023 - Preprint on Unattributable Authorship Text is available

From 2022

2022 - Tutorial ``Catch Me If You GAN: Generation, Detection, and Obfuscation of Deepfake Texts" accepted at WWW'23, with Prof. Dongwon Lee and Adaku Uchendu.

2022 - Survey paper on Authorship Detection of Deepfake Texts will be published at KDD Exploration

2022 - Demo paper on perturbations in the wild is accepted at ICDM'23

2022 - PC Members: PKDD'22, EMNLP'22, WSDM'23, AAAI'23, WWW'23

2022 - Dr. Le accepted tenure-track faculty position at University of Mississippi

2022 - Dr. Le received the IST Ph.D. Student Award for Research Excellence, College of IST, PSU

2022 - Our papers on adversarial texts are accepted at ACL'22

2022 - Paper on RL-based Adversarial Socialbots is accepted at WWW'22.

2022 - Paper on Explainable RL is accepted at AAMAS'22.

2022 - Invited talk ``AI & Machine Learning for Communication Researchers'' at Michigan State University

For full publications please refer to Google Scholar

Adapters Mixup: Mixing Parameter-Efficient Adapters to Enhance the Adversarial Robustness of Fine-tuned Pre-trained Text ClassifiersSecurity Tuc Van Nguyen, Thai Le The 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2024)
Topology-Aware Authorship Attribution of Deepfake Texts with Diverse Writing StylesNeural Text Adaku Uchendu, Thai Le, Dongwon Lee The 27th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI 2024)
Generalizability of Mixture of Domain-Specific Adapters from the Lens of Signed Weight Directions and its Application to Effective Model Pruning Security Tuc Van Nguyen, Thai Le The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024)
A Curious Case of Searching for the Correlation between Training Data and Adversarial Robustness of Transformer Textual ModelsSecurity Dang Cao Cuong, Dung D. Le, Thai Le The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024, Findings)
A Ship of Theseus: Curious Cases of Paraphrasing in LLM-Generated TextsSecurityNeural Text Nafis Irtiza Tripto, Saranya Venkatraman, Dominik Macko, Robert Moro, Ivan Srba, Adaku Uchendu, Thai Le, Dongwon Lee The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024)
The Unexpected Effects of Google Smart Compose on Open-Ended Writing TasksHuman Robert Cummings, Sijan Shrestha, Carrie Smith, Thai Le The 25th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED'24)
ALISON: Fast and Effective Stylometric Authorship ObfuscationSecurity Eric Xin, Saranya Venkatraman, Thai Le, Dongwon Lee Thirty-Eighth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI'24)
The Strange Case of Jekyll and Hyde: Analysis of r/ToastMe and r/RoastMe Users on RedditSocial Media Wooyong Jung, Nishant Asati, Lucy Phuong Doan, Thai Le, Aiping Xiong, Dongwon Lee The International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (AAAI-ICWSM'24)
Enhancing Brand Affinity in the Face of Political Contro- versy: the Role of Disclosing AI Moderator on Social Media PlatformsSocial Media Marie Ozanne, Maria Molina, Thai Le. The American Academy of Advertising conference (AAA'24)
Catch Me If You GPT: Tutorial on Deepfake TextsNeural Text Adaku Uchendu, Saranya Venkatraman, Thai Le, Dongwon Lee Annual Conf. of the North American Chapter of the Asso. for Comp. Linguistics. June 2024 (NAACL'24, Tutorial)
``Are Your Explanations Reliable?" Investigating the Stability of LIME in Explaining Text Classifiers by Marrying XAI and Adversarial Attack Explainable AISecurity Christopher Burger, Lingwei Chen, Thai Le The 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP'23)
MULTITuDE: Large-Scale Multilingual Machine-Generated Text Detection BenchmarkNeural Text Dominik Macko, Robert Moro, Adaku Uchendu, Jason S Lucas, Michiharu Yamashita, Matúš Pikuliak, Ivan Srba, Thai Le, Dongwon Lee, Jakub Simko, Maria Bielikova The 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP'23)
UPTON: Preventing Authorship Leakage from Public Text Release via Data PoisoningSecurityPrivacy Ziyao Wang, Thai Le, Dongwon Lee Findings of The 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP'23)
HANSEN: Human and AI Spoken Text Benchmark for Authorship AnalysisNeural Text Nafis Irtiza Tripto, Adaku Uchendu, Thai Le, Mattia Setzu, Fosca Giannotti, Dongwon Lee Findings of The 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP'23)
Does Human Collaboration Enhance the Accuracy of Identifying Deepfake Texts?Neural TextHuman Adaku Uchendu, Jooyoung Lee, Hua Shen, Thai Le, Ting-Hao Huang and Dongwon Lee 11th AAAI Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing (HCOMP'23)
A Policy-Graph Approach to Explain Reinforcement Learning Agents: A Novel Policy-Graph Approach with Natural Language and Counterfactual Abstractions for Explaining Reinforcement Learning Agents Tongtong Liu, Joe McCalmon, Thai Le, Md Asifur Rahman, Dongwon Lee, Sarra Alqahtani Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems Journal (AAMASJ'23)
Catch Me If You GAN: Generation, Detection, and Obfuscation of Deepfake TextsNeural Text Adaku Uchendu, Thai Le, Dongwon Lee The ACM Web Conference (WWW'23, Tutorial)
Do Language Models Plagiarize?Neural Text Jooyoung Lee, Thai Le, Jinghui Chen, Dongwon Lee The ACM Web Conference (WWW'23)
Attribution and Obfuscation of Neural Text Authorship: A Data Mining PerspectiveNeural Text Adaku Uchendu, Thai Le, Dongwon Lee SIGKDD Explorations, Vol. 25, 2023
CryptText: Interactive Discovery and Visualization of Human-Written Text Perturbations in the WildSecurity Thai Le, Ye Yiran, Yifan Hu, Dongwon Lee IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE'23)
SHIELD: Defending Textual Neural Networks against Multiple Black-Box Adversarial Attacks with Stochastic Multi-Expert PatcherSecurity Thai Le, Noseong Park, Dongwon Lee Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL'22)
Perturbations in the Wild: Leveraging Human-Written Text Perturbations for Realistic Adversarial Attack and DefenseSecurity Thai Le, Jooyoung Lee, Kevin Yen, Yifan Hu, Dongwon Lee Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL'22, Findings)
CAPS: Comprehensible Abstract Policy Summaries for Explaining Reinforcement Learning AgentsExplainable AI Joe McCalmon, Thai Le, Sarra Alqahtani and Dongwon Lee International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS'22)
Socialbots on Fire: Modeling Adversarial Behaviors of Socialbots via Multi-Agent Hierarchical Reinforcement LearningSecuritySocial Media Thai Le, Long-Thanh Tran, Dongwon Lee The ACM Web Conference (WWW'22)
A Sweet Rabbit Hole by DARCY: Using Honeypots to Detect Universal Trigger’s Adversarial AttacksSecurity Thai Le, Noseong Park, Dongwon Lee Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL'21)
TURINGBENCH: A Benchmark Environment for Turing Test in the Age of Neural Text GenerationNeural Text Adaku Uchendu, Zeyu Ma, Thai Le, Rui Zhang and Dongwon Lee Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP'21, Findings)
CHECKER: Detecting Clickbait Thumbnails with Weak Supervision and Co-TeachingWeak an Tianyi Xie, Thai Le, Dongwon Lee European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECML-PKDD'21)
”Does Clickbait Actually Attract More Clicks? Three Clickbait studies you must readFake News Maria Molina, S. Shyam Sundar, Md Main Uddin Rony, Naeemul Hassan, Thai Le, Dongwon ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI'21)
Large-Scale Data-Driven Airline Market Influence Maximization Duanshun Li, Jing Liu, Jinsung Jeon, Seoyoung Hong, Thai Le, Noseong Park, Dongwon Lee ACM SIGKDD Int’l Conf. on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD'21)
MALCOM: Generating Malicious Comments to Attack Neural Fake News Detection ModelsFake NewsSecurityNeural Text Thai Le, Suhang Wang, Dongwon Lee IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM'20)
GRACE: Generating Concise and Informative Contrastive Sample to Explain Neural Network Model’s PredictionExplainable AI Thai Le, Suhang Wang, Dongwon Lee ACM SIGKDD Int’l Conf. on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD'20)
Authorship Attribution for Neural Text GenerationNeural Text Adaku Uchendu, Thai Le, Kai Shu, Dongwon Lee Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP'20)
5 Sources of Clickbaits You Should Know! Using Synthetic Clickbaits to Improve Prediction and Distinguish between Bot-Generated and Human-Written HeadlinesFake NewsNeural Text Thai Le, Kai Shu, Maria Molina, Dongwon Lee, Shyam Sundar, Huan Liu IEEE/ACM Int’l Conf. on Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM'19)
Reading, Commentingand Sharing of Fake News: How Online Bandwagons and Bots Dictate User EngagementSocial MediaFake NewsHuman Maria Molina, Jinping Wang, S. Shyam Sundar, Thai Le, Carlina DiRusso Communication Research, 2019
”Fake News” is Not Simply False Information: A Concept Explication and Taxonomy of Online ContentFake News Maria Molina, Shyam Sundar, Thai Le, Dongwon Lee American Behavioral Scientist, 2019
How Gullible Are You? Predicting Susceptibility to Fake NewsFake News Jia Shen, Robert Cowell, Aditi Gupta, Thai Le, Amulya Yadav, Dongwon Lee International ACM Web Science Conference (WebSci'19)
PathFinder: Graph-based Itemset Embedding for Learning Course Recommendation and BeyondGraph Jason (Jiasheng) Zhang, Thai Le, Yiming Liao, Dongwon Lee IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM'19, Demo)
A Machine Learning Framework for Automating Well Log Depth MatchingSignal Processing Thai Le, Lin Liang, Timon Zimmermann, Smaine Zeroug, Denis Helio Journal of Petrophysics, 2019
Deep headline generation for clickbait detectionNeural Text Shu Kai, Suhang Wang, Thai Le, Dongwon Lee, Huan Liu IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM'18)

NoMatterXAI: Generating “No Matter What” Alterfactual Examples for Explaining Black-Box Text Classification ModelsExplainable AI Tuc Van Nguyen, James Michels, Hua Shen, Thai Le
Beyond Individual Facts: Investigating Categorical Knowledge Locality of Taxonomy and Meronomy Concepts in GPT ModelsNeural TextExplainable AI Christopher Burger, Yifan Hu, Thai Le
PlagBench: Exploring the Duality of Large Language Models in Plagiarism Generation and DetectionNeural Text Jooyoung Lee, Toshini Agrawal, Adaku Uchendu, Thai Le, Jinghui Chen, Dongwon Lee
The Effect of Similarity Measures on Accurate Stability Estimates for Local Surrogate Models in Text-based Explainable AINeural TextExplainable AI Christopher Burger, Charles Walter, Thai Le
NoisyHate: Benchmarking Content Moderation Machine Learning Models with Human-Written Perturbations OnlineSecurity Yiran Ye, Thai Le, Dongwon Lee
Machine Learning Based Detection of Clickbait Posts in Social MediaFake News Xinyue Cao, Thai Le, Jason (Jiasheng) Zhang, Dongwon Lee

CrypText Prototype: Discover text perturbations in the wild - first and largest collection of human-written perturbations online in English [Video] [Demo]
NoisyHate Dataset: Benchmarking offensive text classifiers with real-life human-written (and not machine-generated) perturbations [Dataset]
TuringBench Dataset: Detecting machine-generated from human-written texts [Dataset]
PathFinder: Graph-based Itemset Embedding for Learning Course Recommendation and Beyond

Tutorial: ``Catch Me If You GAN: Generation, Detection, and Obfuscation of Deepfake Texts" Team: Adaku Uchendu (MIT Lincoln Lab), Saranya Venkatraman (PSU), Dongwon Lee (PSU), Thai Le (UM)
Venues (Conference/Location):
- Web Conference 2022 (Austin, TX)
- NSF Summit 2023 (Berkeley, CA)
- NAACL 2024 (Mexico)

Natural Language Processing Indiana University (FA24)
CSCI 343: Fundamentals of Data Science University of Mississippi (FA22, SP23, FA23, SP24)
CSCI 517: Natural Language Processing University of Mississippi (SP23)
ENG 691/CSCI492: Trustworthy Machine Learning University of Mississippi (SP24)

welcome!

Our reseach lab is on a mission to enhance the robustness, safety, and transparency of AI-related technologies in various sociotechnical contexts, ensuring that the society and netizen can harness their power with confidence and clarity. We hope deliver the much needed responsible and ethical development and use of AI, and to also encourage AI applications that nurture humans and the society.

research interests (selective from 2020)

security/privacy/safety/robustness of NLP models: ACL'21, ACL'22a, ACL'22b, EMNLP'23c, ICDE'23, AAAI'24, ACL'24b, ACL'24c EMNLP'24
large language models and neural texts: EMNLP'20, EMNLP'21, EMNLP'23b, EMNLP'23d, HCOMP'23, WWW'23a, WWW'23b, SIGKDD Explorations'23, NAACL'24, ACL'24a, ECAI'24
explainable AI (XAI): KDD'20, AAMAS'22, AAMASJ'23, EMNLP'23a
NLP applications (online fakes, education, social media): ICDM'20, CHI'21, WWW'22, AAAI-ICWSM'24, AIED'24

people

---Current---

Tuc Nguyen (PhD Student @Indiana University → ACL'24, EMNLP'24)
Cuong Nguyen (Research Intern @FPT Software AI Center → ACL'24)
Paulina Eguibar CS Undergraduate Research Intern (@Ole Miss)

---Alumni---

Chris Burger CS PhD (→Instructional Assistant Professor in CS @Ole Miss from Fall 2024) Doctorate Thesis: Explainable AI for Neural Text Classification Models: Robustness and Knowledge Locality (TBD)
Rishabh Shrestha CS MSc (→ Intern @St. Jude → Software Engineer @Central Service Association, MS) MSc Thesis: EarthsciBERT: Pre-trained Language Model for Information Retrieval in Earth Science
Sijan Shrestha CS MSc (→ Application Analyst @Institute of Child Nutrition) MSc Thesis: The Effects of Google Smart Compose In Open-ended Writings
Lisette Kamper-Hinson CS Undergraudate Student (→ Intern @NASA → MSc @Wake Forest University)

---Mentees and Research Interns (past and current)---

James Michael (PhD@Ole Miss)
Cara Yin (PhD@Ole Miss)
Hoang Tran (PhD@Ole Miss)
Jun Jang (Oxford High School → ISEF - 3rd place awarded by NSA)
Henry Harrison (Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science)
Eric Xing (Western Kentucky U. → WashU)
Ziyao Wang (Wuhan University, China → UMD)
Jayesh Khandelwal (IIT Jodhpur, India → NYU)
Yiran Ye (MS@Penn State → Software Engineer @Minitab, PA )
Adaku Uchendu (Phd@Penn State → Lab Technical Staff @MIT Lincoln Laboratory)
Joe McCalmon (CS Undergraduate @Wake Forest U. → Startup)
Tianyi Xie (Shanghai Jia Tong University, China → UCLA)
Xinyue Cao (Intern @Penn State → CMU)

photos

Lab picnic at Ole Miss - 2022 (Sardis Lake, MS)

From 2023

From 2022

welcome!

research interests (selective from 2020)

security/privacy/safety/robustness of NLP models: ACL'21, ACL'22a, ACL'22b, EMNLP'23c, ICDE'23, AAAI'24, ACL'24b, ACL'24c EMNLP'24

large language models and neural texts: EMNLP'20, EMNLP'21, EMNLP'23b, EMNLP'23d, HCOMP'23, WWW'23a, WWW'23b, SIGKDD Explorations'23, NAACL'24, ACL'24a, ECAI'24

explainable AI (XAI): KDD'20, AAMAS'22, AAMASJ'23, EMNLP'23a

NLP applications (online fakes, education, social media): ICDM'20, CHI'21, WWW'22, AAAI-ICWSM'24, AIED'24

people

photos