Chain-of-thought TTS systems rely on language-model planners to translate persona and context into vocal delivery, but it is unclear where this intent is lost when the requested affect conflicts with lexical sentiment. We introduce a bilingual Japanese--English persona--line conflict benchmark in which each item pairs one line with congruent and conflicting personas and pre-declares the expected acoustic direction. We probe this direction in the planner-generated delivery phrase, the planner-written emotion vector, the QwenEmotion-generated vector, and the rendered waveform. Planner outputs are usually direction-correct, while downstream agreement can be substantially lower. Bypassing QwenEmotion provides only modest gains over the full planner-controlled Base. Supervising QwenEmotion raises the direction rate to 75% in Japanese and 84% in English. A learned text-to-latent interface reaches the highest English rate of 89% and the highest Japanese arousal rate of 88%. These results show that learned repair of the plan-to-synthesis interface can recover counter-textual delivery, although its effect differs across languages and acoustic axes.
Tiancheng Xing National University of Singapore, Jerry Li, Yixuan Du, Xiyang Hu Arizona State University
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as rerankers in information retrieval, yet their ranking behavior can be steered by small, natural-sounding prompts. To expose this vulnerability, we present Rank Anything First (RAF), a two-stage token optimization method that crafts concise textual perturbations to consistently promote a target item in LLM-generated rankings while remaining hard to detect. Stage 1 uses Greedy Coordinate Gradient to shortlist candidate tokens at the current position by combining the gradient of the rank-target with a readability score; Stage 2 evaluates those candidates under exact ranking and readability losses using an entropy-based dynamic weighting scheme, and selects a token via temperature-controlled sampling. RAF generates ranking-promoting prompts token-by-token, guided by dual objectives: maximizing ranking effectiveness and preserving linguistic naturalness. Experiments across multiple LLMs show that RAF significantly boosts the rank of target items using naturalistic language, with greater robustness than existing methods in both promoting target items and maintaining naturalness. These findings underscore a critical security implication: LLM-based reranking is inherently susceptible to adversarial manipulation, raising new challenges for the trustworthiness and robustness of modern retrieval systems. Our code is available at: https://github.com/glad-lab/RAF.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表