Honeyed Words, Hidden Daggers: Benchmarking and Training LLMs to See Through Mock Politeness
The Chinese idiom "kou mi fu jian" ("honeyed words, hidden daggers") names speech that is polite in form but hostile in function. We present ZhenhuanBench, a 1,592-item benchmark built from expert commentary on Empresses in the Palace, covering speaker intent, emotion-language mismatch, and per-listener uptake. Text-only evaluation covers 34 LLMs. GPT-6 Astra leads the leaderboard at 73.48% overall, while its listener-reaction score is 58.37%. The annotations also supply supervised traces and string-verifiable training rewards. With 338 gold traces, an 8B model outperforms teacher distillation on identical items. Subsequent RL saturates, and chance correction reduces the estimated recover...
| Authors | Caixin Kang, Sitong Gong, Tianyu Yan et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 19 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 19 October 2026 |
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