Reinforcement Learning–Guided Adaptive Tuning for Out-of-Distribution Harmful Text Detection

ACL ARR 2026 January Submission7101 Authors

Keywords: Reinforcement Learning, Test-Time Tuning, Adaptive Decision, OOD Harmful Text Detection

Abstract: As social media grows, harmful information spreads rapidly across platforms and evolves over time, showing cross-platform and cross-temporal variations. Existing methods rely on fixed model parameters during training, which fail to handle substantial semantic discrepancies, leading to Out-Of-Distribution (OOD) problems. While test-time tuning enables dynamic parameter adjustment, it may lead to excessive adaptation to individual samples. The key challenge is how to adapt to semantic variations during testing while preventing overfitting from continuous tuning. To tackle this issue, this paper proposes RLAT, a reinforcement learning (RL)–guided adaptive tuning method for harmful text detection. First, a tuning joint optimization module is designed to update parameters and adapt to semantic variations during testing. It tunes the model by optimizing consistency loss and applying word-level attention constraints to reduce over-reliance on local words and learn a more robust global representation. Then, to mitigate overfitting caused by continuous tuning, a RL–guided adaptive decision model is introduced to direct the tuning process. It reduces the influence of local samples by selecting data and controlling parameter updates, thereby improving overall test performance. Experimental results show that the RLAT outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in cross-platform and cross-temporal scenarios across multiple public datasets.

Paper Type: Long

Research Area: Computational Social Science, Cultural Analytics, and NLP for Social Good

Research Area Keywords: hate-speech detection

Contribution Types: Model analysis & interpretability, NLP engineering experiment, Data analysis

Languages Studied: Chinese

Submission Number: 7101