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Large language models (LLMs) exhibit reasoning biases, often conflating content plausibility with formal logical validity. This can lead to wrong inferences in critical domains, where plausible arguments are incorrectly deemed logically…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Marco Valentino , Geonhee Kim , Dhairya Dalal , Zhixue Zhao , André Freitas

Large Language Model (LLM) deployment requires guiding the LLM to recognize and not answer unsafe prompts while complying with safe prompts. Previous methods for achieving this require adjusting model weights along with other expensive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Samaksh Bhargav , Zining Zhu

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Diancheng Kang , Zheyuan Liu , Ningshan Ma , Yue Huang , Zhaoxuan Tan , Meng Jiang

Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive abilities in leveraging pretrained knowledge through prompting, but they often struggle with unseen tasks, particularly in data-scarce scenarios. While cross-task in-context learning offers…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-18 Xinyu Tang , Zhihao Lv , Xiaoxue Cheng , Junyi Li , Wayne Xin Zhao , Zujie Wen , Zhiqiang Zhang , Jun Zhou

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

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 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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Anton Korznikov , Andrey Galichin , Alexey Dontsov , Oleg Y. Rogov , Ivan Oseledets , Elena Tutubalina

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-25 Pau Rodriguez , Arno Blaas , Michal Klein , Luca Zappella , Nicholas Apostoloff , Marco Cuturi , Xavier Suau

To ensure AI safety, instruction-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) are specifically trained to ensure alignment, which refers to making models behave in accordance with human intentions. While these models have demonstrated commendable…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-08-19 Haoran Wang , Kai Shu

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models leverage powerful perceptual priors from web-scale Vision-Language Model (VLM) pre-training, yet they remain surprisingly brittle in practice, frequently failing at simple robotic tasks. To mitigate this,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Miranda Muqing Miao , Subin Kim , Brandon Yang , Lyle Ungar

Recent advances in automated theorem proving use Large Language Models (LLMs) to translate informal mathematical statements into formal proofs. However, informal cues are often ambiguous or lack strict logical structure, making it hard for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Shashank Kirtania , Arun Iyer

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-26 Rumi Allbert , James K. Wiles , Vlad Grankovsky

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) can sometimes detect when they are being evaluated and adjust their behavior to appear more aligned, compromising the reliability of safety evaluations. In this paper, we show that adding a steering vector to an…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Tim Tian Hua , Andrew Qin , Samuel Marks , Neel Nanda

Causal interventions in language model representations have largely targeted discrete features, like grammatical number. However, language models must also make use of features that are graded. We introduce a method for causal intervention…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Zhenghao Herbert Zhou , R. Thomas McCoy , Robert Frank

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in simulating human behavior, yet existing agents often exhibit behavioral rigidity, a flaw frequently masked by the self-referential bias of current "LLM-as-a-judge" evaluations. By…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-08 TianZe Zhang , Sirui Sun , Yuhang Xie , Xin Zhang , Zhiqiang Wu , Guojie Song

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

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

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-06 Geert Heyman , Frederik Vandeputte

Large language models exhibit strong multilingual capabilities, yet significant performance gaps persist between dominant and non-dominant languages. Prior work attributes this gap to imbalances between shared and language-specific neurons…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-26 Rhitabrat Pokharel , Ameeta Agrawal , Tanay Nagar