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Despite the success of Instruction Tuning (IT) in training large language models (LLMs), such models often leverage spurious or biased features learnt from their training data and can become misaligned, leading to undesired behaviours.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Tom A. Lamb , Adam Davies , Alasdair Paren , Philip H. S. Torr , Francesco Pinto

Steering vectors are a lightweight method to control language model behavior by adding a learned bias to the activations at inference time. Although steering demonstrates promising performance, recent work shows that it can be unreliable or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Joschka Braun , Carsten Eickhoff , David Krueger , Seyed Ali Bahrainian , Dmitrii Krasheninnikov

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

Although large language models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive proficiency in various tasks, they present potential safety risks, such as `jailbreaks', where malicious inputs can coerce LLMs into generating harmful content bypassing safety…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-26 Isack Lee , Haebin Seong

Large language models (LLMs) are shown to be vulnerable to jailbreaking attacks where adversarial prompts are designed to elicit harmful responses. While existing defenses effectively mitigate single-turn attacks by detecting and filtering…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Hanjiang Hu , Alexander Robey , Changliu Liu

Steering vectors are a promising approach to aligning language model behavior at inference time. In this paper, we propose a framework to assess the limitations of steering vectors as alignment mechanisms. Using a framework of transformer…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-05 Chebrolu Niranjan , Kokil Jaidka , Gerard Christopher Yeo

Large language model (LLM) safety is a critical issue, with numerous studies employing red team testing to enhance model security. Among these, jailbreak methods explore potential vulnerabilities by crafting malicious prompts that induce…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-07 Honglin Mu , Han He , Yuxin Zhou , Yunlong Feng , Yang Xu , Libo Qin , Xiaoming Shi , Zeming Liu , Xudong Han , Qi Shi , Qingfu Zhu , Wanxiang Che

Large language models (LLMs) achieve remarkable advancements by leveraging tools to interact with environments, a critical step toward generalized AI. However, the standard supervised fine-tuning (SFT) approach, which relies on large-scale…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-27 Junjie Ye , Yilong Wu , Sixian Li , Yuming Yang , Zhiheng Xi , Tao Gui , Qi Zhang , Xuanjing Huang , Peng Wang , Zhongchao Shi , Jianping Fan , Zhengyin Du

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly serve as automated evaluators, yet they suffer from "self-preference bias": a tendency to favor their own outputs over those of other models. This bias undermines fairness and reliability in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-05 Dani Roytburg , Matthew Bozoukov , Matthew Nguyen , Jou Barzdukas , Simon Fu , Narmeen Oozeer

Activation steering is a method for controlling Large Language Model (LLM) behavior by intervening in its internal representations to increase the alignment with a specific target feature direction. However, standard interventions, such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Tam Nguyen , Tu Anh Nguyen , Sina Alemohammad , Richard G. Baraniuk

Text generation has a fundamental limitation almost by definition: there is no taking back tokens that have been generated, even when they are clearly problematic. In the context of language model safety, when a partial unsafe generation is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-24 Yiming Zhang , Jianfeng Chi , Hailey Nguyen , Kartikeya Upasani , Daniel M. Bikel , Jason Weston , Eric Michael Smith

Changing the behavior of large language models (LLMs) can be as straightforward as editing the Transformer's residual streams using appropriately constructed "steering vectors." These modifications to internal neural activations, a form of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Jian-Qiao Zhu , Haijiang Yan , Thomas L. Griffiths

Knowledge Tracing (KT) is a critical task in online learning for modeling student knowledge over time. Despite the success of deep learning-based KT models, which rely on sequences of numbers as data, most existing approaches fail to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-11 Unggi Lee , Jiyeong Bae , Dohee Kim , Sookbun Lee , Jaekwon Park , Taekyung Ahn , Gunho Lee , Damji Stratton , Hyeoncheol Kim

We present a novel approach to bias mitigation in large language models (LLMs) by applying steering vectors to modify model activations in forward passes. We compute 8 steering vectors, each corresponding to a different social bias axis,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Zara Siddique , Irtaza Khalid , Liam D. Turner , Luis Espinosa-Anke

We introduce Refusal Steering, an inference-time method to exercise fine-grained control over Large Language Models refusal behaviour on politically sensitive topics without retraining. We replace fragile pattern-based refusal detection…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-25 Iker García-Ferrero , David Montero , Roman Orus

Understanding and controlling the behavior of large language models (LLMs) is an increasingly important topic in multilingual NLP. Beyond prompting or fine-tuning, , i.e.,~manipulating internal representations during inference, has emerged…

Large Language Model (LLM) alignment remains vulnerable to jailbreak attacks that elicit unsafe responses, motivating pre-model and post-model guards. Pre-model guards audit the safety of prompts before invoking target models. However,…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Hongyu Cai , Arjun Arunasalam , Yiming Liang , Antonio Bianchi , Z. Berkay Celik

Zero-shot Text-to-Speech (TTS) models can generate speech that captures both the voice timbre and accent of a reference speaker. However, disentangling these attributes remains challenging, as the output often inherits both the accent and…

Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-03-09 Mu Yang , John H. L. Hansen

We have uncovered a powerful jailbreak technique that leverages large language models' ability to diverge from prior context, enabling them to bypass safety constraints and generate harmful outputs. By simply instructing the LLM to deviate…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-13 Weiliang Zhao , Daniel Ben-Levi , Wei Hao , Junfeng Yang , Chengzhi Mao

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-03 Amrita Bhattacharjee , Shaona Ghosh , Traian Rebedea , Christopher Parisien