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Prompt engineering is a challenging yet crucial task for optimizing the performance of large language models on customized tasks. It requires complex reasoning to examine the model's errors, hypothesize what is missing or misleading in the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-04 Qinyuan Ye , Maxamed Axmed , Reid Pryzant , Fereshte Khani

Inference-time intervention (ITI) has emerged as a promising method for steering large language model (LLM) behavior in a particular direction (e.g., improving helpfulness) by intervening on token representations without costly updates to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-10 Duy Nguyen , Archiki Prasad , Elias Stengel-Eskin , Mohit Bansal

As large language models (LLMs) become more integrated into societal systems, the risk of them perpetuating and amplifying harmful biases becomes a critical safety concern. Traditional methods for mitigating bias often rely on data…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-08-13 Shivam Dubey

Audio diffusion models can synthesize high-fidelity music from text, yet achieving fine-grained control over specific musical attributes remains challenging, as their internal mechanisms for representing high-level concepts are poorly…

Sound · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Łukasz Staniszewski , Katarzyna Zaleska , Mateusz Modrzejewski , Kamil Deja

Controlling undesirable Large Language Model (LLM) behaviors, such as the generation of unsafe content or failing to adhere to safety guidelines, often relies on costly fine-tuning. Activation steering provides an alternative for…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Amr Hegazy , Mostafa Elhoushi , Amr Alanwar

We present Fusion Steering, an activation steering methodology that improves factual accuracy in large language models (LLMs) for question-answering (QA) tasks. This approach introduces flexible steering configurations, including full-layer…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Waldemar Chang , Alhassan Yasin

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance across many tasks, yet aligning them with desired behaviors remains challenging. Activation intervention has emerged as an effective and economical method to modify the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-26 Weixuan Wang , Jingyuan Yang , Wei Peng

Activation steering methods were shown to be effective in conditioning language model generation by additively intervening over models' intermediate representations. However, the evaluation of these techniques has so far been limited to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-02 Daniel Scalena , Gabriele Sarti , Malvina Nissim

Controlling specific behaviors in large language models while preserving their general capabilities is a central challenge for safe and reliable artificial intelligence deployment. Current steering methods, such as vector addition and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-31 Hieu M. Vu , Tan M. Nguyen

Language models (LMs) are typically post-trained for desired capabilities and behaviors via weight-based or prompt-based steering, but the former is time-consuming and expensive, and the latter is not precisely controllable and often…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Sasha Cui , Zhongren Chen

Large Language Models (LLMs), despite advances in instruction tuning, often fail to follow complex user instructions. Activation steering techniques aim to mitigate this by manipulating model internals, but have a potential risk of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Minjae Kang , Jaehyung Kim

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as knowledge bases, but keeping them up to date requires targeted knowledge editing (KE). However, it remains unclear how edits are implemented inside the model once applied. In this work,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Yuan Cao , Mingyang Wang , Hinrich Schütze

Responsible deployment of language models requires mechanisms for refusing unsafe prompts while preserving model performance. While most approaches modify model weights through additional training, we explore an alternative: steering model…

We present an approach called Dialogue Action Tokens (DAT) that adapts language model agents to plan goal-directed dialogues. The core idea is to treat each utterance as an action, thereby converting dialogues into games where existing…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-19 Kenneth Li , Yiming Wang , Fernanda Viégas , Martin Wattenberg

Prompt engineering is widely used to shape large language model behavior, yet it is often treated as a practical heuristic rather than as a form of natural-language control. This paper develops a cognitive-semantic account in which prompts…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Dongseok Kim , Hyoungsun Choi , Mohamed Jismy Aashik Rasool , Gisung Oh

When language model agents tackle complex software engineering tasks, they often degrade over long trajectories, which we define as *agent drift*. We focus on two recurring failure modes *overthinking* and *overacting*, i.e., where the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Yuan Sui , Yulin Chen , Yibo Li , Xue Jiang , Yufei He , Yihong Dong , Xiaoxin He , Tianyu Gao , Bryan Hooi

This research explores strategies for steering the output of large language models (LLMs) towards specific styles, such as sentiment, emotion, or writing style, by adding style vectors to the activations of hidden layers during text…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-05 Kai Konen , Sophie Jentzsch , Diaoulé Diallo , Peer Schütt , Oliver Bensch , Roxanne El Baff , Dominik Opitz , Tobias Hecking

Activation steering has emerged as a powerful method for guiding the behavior of generative models towards desired outcomes such as toxicity mitigation. However, most existing methods apply interventions uniformly across all inputs,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-04 Alex Ferrando , Xavier Suau , Jordi Gonzàlez , Pau Rodriguez

Emotional expression in human speech is nuanced and compositional, often involving multiple, sometimes conflicting, affective cues that may diverge from linguistic content. In contrast, most expressive text-to-speech systems enforce a…

Sound · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Siyi Wang , Shihong Tan , Siyi Liu , Hong Jia , Gongping Huang , James Bailey , Ting Dang

We propose affine concept editing (ACE) as an approach for steering language models' behavior by intervening directly in activations. We begin with an affine decomposition of model activation vectors and show that prior methods for steering…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-29 Thomas Marshall , Adam Scherlis , Nora Belrose