Related papers: Steering Language Models With Activation Engineeri…

The ability to follow instructions is crucial for numerous real-world applications of language models. In pursuit of deeper insights and more powerful capabilities, we derive instruction-specific vector representations from language models…

We introduce Contrastive Activation Addition (CAA), an innovative method for steering language models by modifying their activations during forward passes. CAA computes "steering vectors" by averaging the difference in residual stream…

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…

Activation steering controls language model behavior by adding directions to internal representations at inference time, but standard residual-stream steering can fail in stateful dialogue. We identify KV-cache contamination as a key…

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate increasing conversational fluency, yet instilling them with nuanced, human-like emotional expression remains a significant challenge. Current alignment techniques often address surface-level output…

The groundbreaking capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) offer new opportunities for enhancing human-computer interaction through emotion-adaptive Artificial Intelligence (AI). However, deliberately controlling the sentiment in these…

The increasing capabilities of large generative models and their ever more widespread deployment have raised concerns about their reliability, safety, and potential misuse. To address these issues, recent works have proposed to control…

Activation engineering is becoming increasingly popular as a means of online control of large language models (LLMs). In this work, we extend the idea of inference-time steering with vectors that represent a behavioral direction of interest…

Effective and reliable control over large language model (LLM) behavior is a significant challenge. While activation steering methods, which add steering vectors to a model's hidden states, are a promising approach, existing techniques…

Large language models have transformed AI, yet reliably controlling their outputs remains a challenge. This paper explores activation engineering, where outputs of pre-trained LLMs are controlled by manipulating their activations at…

The field of large language models (LLMs) has grown rapidly in recent years, driven by the desire for better efficiency, interpretability, and safe use. Building on the novel approach of "activation engineering," this study explores…

Steering methods influence Large Language Model behavior by identifying semantic directions in hidden representations, but are typically realized through inference-time activation interventions that apply a fixed, global modification to the…

Activation steering -- adding a vector to a model's residual stream to modify its behavior -- is widely used in safety evaluations as if the model cannot detect the intervention. We test this assumption, introducing steering awareness: a…

Adapting models to a language that was only partially present in the pre-training data requires fine-tuning, which is expensive in terms of both data and computational resources. As an alternative to fine-tuning, we explore the potential of…

Controlling the behavior of large language models (LLMs) at inference time is essential for aligning outputs with human abilities and safety requirements. \emph{Activation steering} provides a lightweight alternative to prompt engineering…

Large language models can be steered at inference time through prompting or activation interventions, but activation steering methods often underperform compared to prompt-based approaches. We propose a framework that formulates prompt…

Recent work in activation steering has demonstrated the potential to better control the outputs of Large Language Models (LLMs), but it involves finding steering vectors. This is difficult because engineers do not typically know how…

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…

Activation steering is a method for controlling Large Language Model (LLM) behavior by intervening in its internal representations to increase the alignment with a specific target feature direction. However, standard interventions, such as…

This work examines whether activating latent subspaces in language models (LLMs) can steer scientific code generation toward a specific programming language. Five causal LLMs were first evaluated on scientific coding prompts to quantify…