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Recent advancements in large language models have revolutionized text generation with their remarkable capabilities. These models can produce controlled texts that closely adhere to specific requirements when prompted appropriately.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-17 Zhe Yang , Yi Huang , Yaqin Chen , Xiaoting Wu , Junlan Feng , Chao Deng

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

This paper investigates how Large Language Models (LLMs) represent non-English tokens -- a question that remains underexplored despite recent progress. We propose a lightweight intervention method using representation steering, where a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-27 Omar Mahmoud , Buddhika Laknath Semage , Thommen George Karimpanal , Santu Rana

Large language models (LLMs) often encode cognitive behaviors unpredictably across prompts, layers, and contexts, making them difficult to diagnose and control. We present CBMAS, a diagnostic framework for continuous activation steering,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Ahmed H. Ismail , Anthony Kuang , Ayo Akinkugbe , Kevin Zhu , Sean O'Brien

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

Generative artificial intelligence models learn probability distributions from data and produce novel samples that capture the salient properties of their training sets. Proteins are particularly attractive for such approaches given their…

Biomolecules · Quantitative Biology 2026-02-27 Filippo Stocco , Michele Garibbo , Noelia Ferruz

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) 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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Zifeng Cheng , Jinwei Gan , Zhiwei Jiang , Cong Wang , Yafeng Yin , Xiang Luo , Yuchen Fu , Qing Gu

Discrete diffusion language models (DLMs) generate text by iteratively denoising all positions in parallel, offering an alternative to autoregressive models. Controlled generation methods for DLMs, imported from autoregressive models, apply…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Hanhan Zhou , Shamik Roy , Rashmi Gangadharaiah

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

Researchers have been studying approaches to steer the behavior of Large Language Models (LLMs) and build personalized LLMs tailored for various applications. While fine-tuning seems to be a direct solution, it requires substantial…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-31 Yuanpu Cao , Tianrong Zhang , Bochuan Cao , Ziyi Yin , Lu Lin , Fenglong Ma , Jinghui Chen

We improve the informativeness of models for conditional text generation using techniques from computational pragmatics. These techniques formulate language production as a game between speakers and listeners, in which a speaker should…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-04-05 Sheng Shen , Daniel Fried , Jacob Andreas , Dan Klein

Mechanistic interpretability seeks to understand the internal mechanisms of machine learning models, where localization -- identifying the important model components -- is a key step. Activation patching, also known as causal tracing or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-18 Fred Zhang , Neel Nanda

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

The predominant knowledge-based approach to automated model construction, compositional modelling, employs a set of models of particular functional components. Its inference mechanism takes a scenario describing the constituent interacting…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2011-07-04 J. Keppens , Q. Shen

Controlling the behavior of large language models (LLMs) at inference time is essential for aligning outputs with human abilities and safety requirements. \emph{Activation steering} provides a lightweight alternative to prompt engineering…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Diaoulé Diallo , Katharina Dworatzyk , Sophie Jentzsch , Peer Schütt , Sabine Theis , Tobias Hecking

Diffusion probabilistic models have achieved enormous success in the field of image generation and manipulation. In this paper, we explore a novel paradigm of using the diffusion model and classifier guidance in the latent semantic space…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-05-25 Changhao Shi , Haomiao Ni , Kai Li , Shaobo Han , Mingfu Liang , Martin Renqiang Min

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

A popular approach to post-training control of large language models (LLMs) is the steering of intermediate latent representations. Namely, identify a well-chosen direction depending on the task at hand and perturbs representations along…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Magamed Taimeskhanov , Samuel Vaiter , Damien Garreau

Steering, or direct manipulation of internal activations to guide LLM responses toward specific semantic concepts, is emerging as a promising avenue for both understanding how semantic concepts are stored within LLMs and advancing LLM…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Parmida Davarmanesh , Ashia Wilson , Adityanarayanan Radhakrishnan