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The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has made machine-generated text increasingly difficult to distinguish from human-written text. While recent studies explore leveraging internal representations of language models to…

Applications · Statistics 2026-05-14 Luxu Liang , Xiang Li

Steering vectors are a lightweight method for controlling text properties by adding a learned bias to language model activations at inference time. While predominantly studied for multiple-choice and toy tasks, their effectiveness in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Joschka Braun , Carsten Eickhoff , Seyed Ali Bahrainian

Semantic sentence embedding models encode natural language sentences into vectors, such that closeness in embedding space indicates closeness in the semantics between the sentences. Bilingual data offers a useful signal for learning such…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-11-20 John Wieting , Graham Neubig , Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick

Large language models (LLMs) are able to generate grammatically well-formed text, but how do they encode their syntactic knowledge internally? While prior work has focused largely on binary grammatical contrasts, in this work, we study the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-16 Alina Klerings , Jannik Brinkmann , Daniel Ruffinelli , Simone Ponzetto

The mechanisms by which reasoning training reshapes LLMs' internal computations remain unclear. We study lightweight steering vectors inserted into the base model's residual stream and trained with a reinforcement-learning objective. These…

Steering vectors (SVs) offer a lightweight way to control large language models (LLMs) at inference time by shifting hidden activations, providing a practical middle ground between prompting and fine-tuning. Yet SVs can be unreliable in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Jiaqian Li , Yanshu Li , Kuan-Hao Huang

Transformer-based models generate hidden states that are difficult to interpret. In this work, we analyze hidden states and modify them at inference, with a focus on motion forecasting. We use linear probing to analyze whether interpretable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-19 Omer Sahin Tas , Royden Wagner

A popular approach to post-training control of large language models (LLMs) is the steering of intermediate latent representations. Namely, identify a well-chosen direction depending on the task at hand and perturbs representations along…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Magamed Taimeskhanov , Samuel Vaiter , Damien Garreau

Speculative decoding accelerates language model inference by separating generation into fast drafting and parallel verification. Its main limitation is drafter-verifier misalignment, which limits token acceptance and reduces overall…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-14 Frédéric Berdoz , Peer Rheinboldt , Roger Wattenhofer

Steering, or direct manipulation of internal activations to guide LLM responses toward specific semantic concepts, is emerging as a promising avenue for both understanding how semantic concepts are stored within LLMs and advancing LLM…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Parmida Davarmanesh , Ashia Wilson , Adityanarayanan Radhakrishnan

Precise control over language model generation is vital for ensuring both safety and reliability. Although prompt engineering and steering are commonly used to intervene in model behaviors, the vast number of parameters in models often…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Mengru Wang , Ziwen Xu , Shengyu Mao , Shumin Deng , Zhaopeng Tu , Huajun Chen , Ningyu Zhang

Language models can be steered by modifying their internal representations to control concepts such as emotion, style, or truthfulness in generation. However, the conditions for an effective intervention remain unclear and are often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Jianshu She , Xinyue Li , Eric Xing , Zhengzhong Liu , Qirong Ho

Understanding how large audio models represent music, and using that understanding to steer generation, is both challenging and underexplored. Inspired by mechanistic interpretability in language models, where direction vectors in…

Large language models (LLMs) encode a diverse range of linguistic features within their latent representations, which can be harnessed to steer their output toward specific target characteristics. In this paper, we modify the internal…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-27 Sumanta Bhattacharyya , Pedram Rooshenas

Large language models benefit from training with a large amount of unlabeled text, which gives them increasingly fluent and diverse generation capabilities. However, using these models for text generation that takes into account target…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-09-16 Dian Yu , Zhou Yu , Kenji Sagae

Steering vectors are a promising approach to aligning language model behavior at inference time. In this paper, we propose a framework to assess the limitations of steering vectors as alignment mechanisms. Using a framework of transformer…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-05 Chebrolu Niranjan , Kokil Jaidka , Gerard Christopher Yeo

Steering vectors are a lightweight method to control language model behavior by adding a learned bias to the activations at inference time. Although steering demonstrates promising performance, recent work shows that it can be unreliable or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Joschka Braun , Carsten Eickhoff , David Krueger , Seyed Ali Bahrainian , Dmitrii Krasheninnikov

Steering language models (LMs) by modifying internal activations is a popular approach for controlling text generation. Unsupervised dictionary learning methods, e.g., sparse autoencoders, can be scaled to produce many steering vectors, but…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-05 Jiuding Sun , Sidharth Baskaran , Zhengxuan Wu , Michael Sklar , Christopher Potts , Atticus Geiger

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in natural language understanding and generation, but controlling their behavior reliably remains challenging, especially in open-ended generation settings. This paper…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-08 Zirui He , Mingyu Jin , Bo Shen , Ali Payani , Yongfeng Zhang , Mengnan Du

The finetuning of pretrained transformer-based language generation models are typically conducted in an end-to-end manner, where the model learns to attend to relevant parts of the input by itself. However, there does not exist a mechanism…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-03-03 Jiabao Ji , Yoon Kim , James Glass , Tianxing He