Related papers: Programming Refusal with Conditional Activation St…
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…
Controlling the behaviors of large language models (LLM) is fundamental to their safety alignment and reliable deployment. However, existing steering methods are primarily driven by empirical insights and lack theoretical performance…
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.…
While modern LLMs are aligned to refuse harmful requests, it is essential to understand the underlying mechanistic basis of this refusal behavior for model safety analysis. For example, steering-based jailbreak attacks exploit this by…
Safety alignment of large language models currently faces a central challenge: existing alignment techniques often prioritize mitigating responses to harmful prompts at the expense of overcautious behavior, leading models to incorrectly…
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…
Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) exhibit outstanding performance on vision-language tasks but struggle with hallucination problems. Through in-depth analysis of LVLM activation patterns, we reveal two key findings: 1) truthfulness and…
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…
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…
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…
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…
To deliver high-quality, personalized responses, large language models (LLMs) must effectively incorporate context -- personal, demographic, and cultural information specific to an end-user. For example, asking the model to explain Newton's…
Steering large language models (LLMs) is usually done by either instruction prompting or activation steering. Prompting often gives strong control, but caches guidance tokens at every layer and can clutter long interactions; activation…
Recent work in activation steering has demonstrated the potential to better control the outputs of Large Language Models (LLMs), but it involves finding steering vectors. This is difficult because engineers do not typically know how…
Safety alignment is indispensable for Large Language Models (LLMs) to defend threats from malicious instructions. However, recent researches reveal safety-aligned LLMs prone to reject benign queries due to the exaggerated safety issue,…
In this paper, we investigate whether refusal behavior can be predicted from LLM intermediate activations before decoding using linear probes trained on residual stream activations at each transformer block. We find that refusal is linearly…
Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable success in recent years, enabling a wide range of applications, including intelligent assistants that support users' daily life and work. A critical factor in building such assistants is…
LLMs increasingly exhibit over-refusal behavior, where safety mechanisms cause models to reject benign instructions that seemingly resemble harmful content. This phenomenon diminishes utility in production applications that repeatedly rely…
Inference-time intervention (ITI) has emerged as a promising method for steering large language model (LLM) behavior in a particular direction (e.g., improving helpfulness) by intervening on token representations without costly updates to…
Activation steering has emerged as a powerful method for guiding the behavior of generative models towards desired outcomes such as toxicity mitigation. However, most existing methods apply interventions uniformly across all inputs,…