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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

Steering vectors are a lightweight method for controlling language model behavior by adding a learned bias to the activations at inference time. Although effective on average, steering effect sizes vary across samples and are unreliable for…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-23 Joschka Braun

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

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Mengru Wang , Ziwen Xu , Shengyu Mao , Shumin Deng , Zhaopeng Tu , Huajun Chen , Ningyu Zhang

Recent work on activation and latent steering has demonstrated that modifying internal representations can effectively guide large language models (LLMs) toward improved reasoning and efficiency without additional training. However, most…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-07 Tuc Nguyen , Thai Le

Steering has emerged as a practical approach to enable post-hoc guidance of LLMs towards enforcing a specific behavior. However, it remains largely underexplored for multimodal LLMs (MLLMs); furthermore, existing steering techniques, such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Jayneel Parekh , Pegah Khayatan , Mustafa Shukor , Arnaud Dapogny , Alasdair Newson , Matthieu Cord

Reflection, the ability of large language models (LLMs) to evaluate and revise their own reasoning, has been widely used to improve performance on complex reasoning tasks. Yet, most prior works emphasizes designing reflective prompting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-12 Fu-Chieh Chang , Yu-Ting Lee , Pei-Yuan Wu

Jailbreak prompts can trigger harmful completions on aligned LLMs, In accordance, safety steering has been proposed: test-time activation interventions that steer jailbreak activations to trigger refusal while preserving benign utility.…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Luoyu Chen , Weiqi Wang , Zhiyi Tian , Chenhan Zhang , Feng Wu , Jianhuan Huang , Ahmed Asiri , Shui Yu

Jailbreaking attacks can effectively induce unsafe behaviors in Large Language Models (LLMs); however, the transferability of these attacks across different models remains limited. This study aims to understand and enhance the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-05 Junxiao Yang , Zhexin Zhang , Shiyao Cui , Hongning Wang , Minlie Huang

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

Activation steering methods enable inference-time control of large language model (LLM) behavior without retraining, but current approaches face a fundamental trade-off: sample-efficient methods suboptimally capture steering signals from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-09 Kartik Sharma , Rakshit S. Trivedi

Large Language Models (LLMs) often rely on long chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning to solve complex tasks. While effective, these trajectories are frequently inefficient, leading to high latency from excessive token generation, or unstable…

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

The ability to achieve long-term goals is a key challenge in the current development of large language models (LLMs). To address this, pre-trained LLMs can be fine-tuned with reinforcement learning (RL) to explore solutions that optimize a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-11 Jean Vassoyan , Nathanaël Beau , Roman Plaud

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have led to the development of thinking language models that generate extensive internal reasoning chains before producing responses. While these models achieve improved performance,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-23 Constantin Venhoff , Iván Arcuschin , Philip Torr , Arthur Conmy , Neel Nanda

Knowledge Tracing (KT) aims to estimate a learner's evolving mastery based on interaction histories. Recent studies have explored Large Language Models (LLMs) for KT via autoregressive nature, but such approaches typically require…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-06 Unggi Lee , Joo Young Kim , Ran Ju , Minyoung Jung , Jeyeon Eo

Despite impressive breadth, LLMs still rely on explicit reasoning instructions or static, one-fits-all steering methods, leaving a gap for adaptive, instruction-free reasoning amplification. We present Prototype-Based Dynamic Steering…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-08 Ceyhun Efe Kayan , Li Zhang

Despite extensive efforts in safety alignment, large language models (LLMs) remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks. Activation steering offers a training-free defense method but relies on fixed steering coefficients, resulting in suboptimal…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Weixiang Zhao , Jiahe Guo , Yulin Hu , Yang Deng , An Zhang , Xingyu Sui , Xinyang Han , Yanyan Zhao , Bing Qin , Tat-Seng Chua , Ting Liu

As vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly deployed in open-world scenarios, they can be easily induced by visual jailbreak attacks to generate harmful content, posing serious risks to model safety and trustworthy usage. Recent…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-26 Xingyu Zhu , Beier Zhu , Shuo Wang , Junfeng Fang , Kesen Zhao , Hanwang Zhang , Xiangnan He

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-15 Alessandro Stolfo , Vidhisha Balachandran , Safoora Yousefi , Eric Horvitz , Besmira Nushi