Related papers: Improving Activation Steering in Language Models w…
Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance across many generation tasks. Nevertheless, effectively aligning them with desired behaviors remains a significant challenge. Activation steering is an effective and…
While large language models (LLMs) have seen unprecedented advancements in capabilities and applications across a variety of use-cases, safety alignment of these models is still an area of active research. The fragile nature of LLMs, even…
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…
Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) to adapt to evolving safety policies is costly and impractical. Mechanistic interpretability enables inference-time control through latent activation steering, yet its potential for precise,…
Steering vectors offer a training-free mechanism for controlling reasoning behaviors in large language models, but constructing effective vectors requires identifying genuine behavioral signals in the model's hidden states. For behaviors…
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…
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…
Steering vectors have emerged as a lightweight and effective approach for aligning large language models (LLMs) at inference time, enabling modulation over model behaviors by shifting LLM representations towards a target behavior. However,…
Accent variability remains a major errors in automatic speech recognition, yet most adaptation methods rely on parameter fine-tuning without understanding where accent information is encoded. We treat accent variation as an interpretable…
We introduce Mechanistic Error Reduction with Abstention (MERA), a principled framework for steering language models (LMs) to mitigate errors through selective, adaptive interventions. Unlike existing methods that rely on fixed, manually…
Best-of-$N$ reasoning improves the accuracy of language models in solving complex tasks by sampling multiple candidate solutions and then selecting the best one based on some criteria. A critical bottleneck for this strategy is the output…
Large Language Models (LLMs) encode vast amounts of parametric knowledge during pre-training. As world knowledge evolves, effective deployment increasingly depends on their ability to faithfully follow externally retrieved context. When…
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…
Despite the remarkable achievements of language models (LMs) across a broad spectrum of tasks, their propensity for generating toxic outputs remains a prevalent concern. Current solutions involving finetuning or auxiliary models usually…
Recent advances in mechanistic interpretability have revealed that large language models (LLMs) develop internal representations corresponding not only to concrete entities but also distinct, human-understandable abstract concepts and…
Activation steering has emerged as a powerful tool to shape LLM behavior without the need for weight updates. While its inherent brittleness and unreliability are well-documented, its safety implications remain underexplored. In this work,…
Masked diffusion language models (MDLMs) generate text via iterative masked-token denoising, enabling mask-parallel decoding and distinct controllability and efficiency tradeoffs from autoregressive LLMs. Yet, efficient representation-level…
Safety alignment is indispensable for Large Language Models (LLMs) to defend threats from malicious instructions. However, recent researches reveal safety-aligned LLMs prone to reject benign queries due to the exaggerated safety issue,…
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…
Activation steering is a promising technique for controlling LLM behavior by adding semantically meaningful vectors directly into a model's hidden states during inference. It is often framed as a precise, interpretable, and potentially…