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Large Multi-Modal Models (LMMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities as general-purpose chatbots able to engage in conversations about visual inputs. However, their responses are influenced by societal biases present in their training…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-09-19 Neale Ratzlaff , Matthew Lyle Olson , Musashi Hinck , Estelle Aflalo , Shao-Yen Tseng , Vasudev Lal , Phillip Howard

Large language models (LLMs) are known to perpetuate stereotypes and exhibit biases. Various strategies have been proposed to mitigate these biases, but most work studies biases as a black-box problem without considering how concepts are…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-19 Hannah Cyberey , Yangfeng Ji , David Evans

Multilingual Large Language Models (LLMs) often exhibit hallucinations such as unintended code-switching, reducing reliability in downstream tasks. We propose latent-space language steering, a lightweight inference-time method that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Andrey Goncharov , Nikolai Kondusov , Alexey Zaytsev

In this work, we examine how targeted perturbations in the activation space of Language Models (LMs) can encode complex reasoning patterns. We inject steering vectors, derived from LM activations, into LMs during inference time and study…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-24 Jason Zhang , Scott Viteri

While a lot of recent research focuses on enhancing the textual reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) by optimizing the multi-agent framework or reasoning chains, several benchmark tasks can be solved with 100\% success…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Yongchao Chen , Harsh Jhamtani , Srinagesh Sharma , Chuchu Fan , Chi Wang

Activation steering is a widely used approach for controlling large language model (LLM) behavior by intervening on internal representations. Existing methods largely rely on the Linear Representation Hypothesis, assuming behavioral…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Shivam Raval , Hae Jin Song , Linlin Wu , Abir Harrasse , Jeff M. Phillips , Fazl Barez , Amirali Abdullah

Recent advancements in language models (LMs) have marked a shift toward the growing importance of post-training. Yet, post-training approaches such as supervised fine-tuning (SFT) do not guarantee the effective use of knowledge acquired…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-30 Chunyuan Deng , Ruidi Chang , Hanjie Chen

Methods for controlling large language models (LLMs), including local weight fine-tuning, LoRA-based adaptation, and activation-based interventions, are often studied in isolation, obscuring their connections and making comparison…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Ziwen Xu , Chenyan Wu , Hengyu Sun , Haiwen Hong , Mengru Wang , Yunzhi Yao , Longtao Huang , Hui Xue , Shumin Deng , Zhixuan Chu , Huajun Chen , Ningyu Zhang

Language models (LLMs) offer potential as a source of knowledge for agents that need to acquire new task competencies within a performance environment. We describe efforts toward a novel agent capability that can construct cues (or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-22 James R. Kirk , Robert E. Wray , Peter Lindes , John E. Laird

Multimodal large language models can exhibit text dominance, over-relying on linguistic priors instead of grounding predictions in non-text inputs. One example is large audio-language models (LALMs) where decisive audio evidence can be…

Sound · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Neta Glazer , Lenny Aharon , Ethan Fetaya

LLMs have shown remarkable capabilities, but precisely controlling their response behavior remains challenging. Existing activation steering methods alter LLM behavior indiscriminately, limiting their practical applicability in settings…

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across vision-language tasks, yet their large-scale deployment raises pressing concerns about memorized private data, outdated knowledge, and harmful…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Chenlu Ding , Jiancan Wu , Leheng Sheng , Fan Zhang , Yancheng Yuan , Xiang Wang , Xiangnan He

Large language models (LLMs) can be controlled at inference time through prompts (in-context learning) and internal activations (activation steering). Different accounts have been proposed to explain these methods, yet their common goal of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-13 Eric Bigelow , Daniel Wurgaft , YingQiao Wang , Noah Goodman , Tomer Ullman , Hidenori Tanaka , Ekdeep Singh Lubana

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have recently emerged as a powerful tool for language model steering. Prior work has explored top-k SAE latents for steering, but we observe that many dimensions among the top-k latents capture non-semantic…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Jiaqing Xie

While large language models (LLMs) are trained to align with human values, their generations may still violate safety constraints. A growing line of work addresses this problem by modifying the model's sampling policy at decoding time using…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Bat-Sheva Einbinder , Hen Davidov , Yee Whye Teh , Yarin Gal , Yaniv Romano

Large language models (LLMs) excel at diverse tasks, but their deployment on resource-constrained devices remains challenging. Existing methods like quantization, pruning, and distillation can reduce memory footprint but often demand…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Siddharth Tandon

Activation steering offers a promising approach to controlling the behavior of Large Language Models by directly manipulating their internal activations. However, most existing methods struggle to jointly steer multiple attributes, often…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Xinyan Jiang , Lin Zhang , Jiayi Zhang , Qingsong Yang , Guimin Hu , Di Wang , Lijie Hu

Activation steering has emerged as a cost-effective paradigm for modifying large language model (LLM) behaviors. Existing methods typically intervene at the block level, steering the bundled activations of selected attention heads,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-05 Zijian Feng , Tianjiao Li , Zixiao Zhu , Hanzhang Zhou , Junlang Qian , Li Zhang , Jia Jim Deryl Chua , Lee Onn Mak , Gee Wah Ng , Kezhi Mao

Prompt engineering and finetuning aim to maximize language model performance on a given metric (like toxicity reduction). However, these methods do not fully elicit a model's capabilities. To reduce this gap, we introduce activation…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-11 Alexander Matt Turner , Lisa Thiergart , Gavin Leech , David Udell , Juan J. Vazquez , Ulisse Mini , Monte MacDiarmid

Given the prompt "Rome is in", can we steer a language model to flip its prediction of an incorrect token "France" to a correct token "Italy" by only multiplying a few relevant activation vectors with scalars? We argue that successfully…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-08 Niklas Stoehr , Kevin Du , Vésteinn Snæbjarnarson , Robert West , Ryan Cotterell , Aaron Schein