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Having an LLM that aligns with human preferences is essential for accommodating individual needs, such as maintaining writing style or generating specific topics of interest. The majority of current alignment methods rely on fine-tuning or…
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly paired with activation-based monitoring to detect and prevent harmful behaviors that may not be apparent at the surface-text level. However, existing activation safety approaches, trained on…
Steering methods influence Large Language Model behavior by identifying semantic directions in hidden representations, but are typically realized through inference-time activation interventions that apply a fixed, global modification to the…
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…
Reliable behavior control is central to deploying large language models (LLMs) on the web. Activation steering offers a tuning-free route to align attributes (e.g., truthfulness) that ensure trustworthy generation. Prevailing approaches…
Activation steering has emerged as a cost-effective paradigm for modifying large language model (LLM) behaviors. Existing methods typically intervene at the block level, steering the bundled activations of selected attention heads,…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in high-stakes decision-making contexts. While prior work has shown that LLMs exhibit cognitive biases behaviorally, whether these biases correspond to identifiable internal…
Although achieving promising performance, recent analyses show that current generative large language models (LLMs) may still capture dataset biases and utilize them for generation, leading to poor generalizability and harmfulness of LLMs.…
Protein Language Models (PLMs), pre-trained on extensive evolutionary data from natural proteins, have emerged as indispensable tools for protein design. While powerful, PLMs often struggle to produce proteins with precisely specified…
Multi-agent debate has been shown to improve reasoning in large language models (LLMs). However, it is compute-intensive, requiring generation of long transcripts before answering questions. To address this inefficiency, we develop a…
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…
We introduce Mechanistic Error Reduction with Abstention (MERA), a principled framework for steering language models (LMs) to mitigate errors through selective, adaptive interventions. Unlike existing methods that rely on fixed, manually…
Language models (LMs) can be directed to perform target tasks by using labeled examples or natural language prompts. But selecting examples or writing prompts for can be challenging--especially in tasks that involve unusual edge cases,…
Language models are instruction-tuned to refuse harmful requests, but the mechanisms underlying this behavior remain poorly understood. Popular steering methods operate on the residual stream and degrade output coherence at high…
Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning is a critical capability for large language models (LLMs), enabling them to tackle com- plex multi-step tasks. While base LLMs, pre-trained on general text corpora, often struggle with reasoning due to a…
Recent work on domain-specific reasoning with large language models (LLMs) often relies on training-intensive approaches that require parameter updates. While activation steering has emerged as a parameter efficient alternative, existing…
Recent progress in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has unlocked powerful cross-modal reasoning abilities, but also raised new safety concerns, particularly when faced with adversarial multimodal inputs. To improve the safety of…
Text analysis of tabular data relies on two core operations: \emph{summarization} for corpus-level theme extraction and \emph{tagging} for row-level labeling. A critical limitation of employing large language models (LLMs) for these tasks…
Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with specific personas typically relies on expensive and monolithic Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) or RLHF. While effective, these methods require training distinct models for every target personality…
Large language model-based multi-agent systems (LLM-MAS) effectively accomplish complex and dynamic tasks through inter-agent communication, but this reliance introduces substantial safety vulnerabilities. Existing attack methods targeting…