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Latent space steering methods provide a practical approach to controlling large language models by applying steering vectors to intermediate activations, guiding outputs toward desired behaviors while avoiding retraining. Despite their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Shawn Im , Sharon Li

In complex multi-agent environments, achieving efficient learning and desirable behaviours is a significant challenge for Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) systems. This work explores the potential of combining MARL with Large…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Philipp D. Siedler , Ian Gemp

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has made significant strides in enabling artificial agents to learn diverse behaviors. However, learning an effective policy often requires a large number of environment interactions. To mitigate sample…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-04-04 Yash Shukla , Tanushree Burman , Abhishek Kulkarni , Robert Wright , Alvaro Velasquez , Jivko Sinapov

Test-time compute has emerged as a powerful paradigm for improving the performance of large language models (LLMs), where generating multiple outputs or refining individual chains can significantly boost answer accuracy. However, existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-26 Sheng Liu , Tianlang Chen , Pan Lu , Haotian Ye , Yizheng Chen , Lei Xing , James Zou

Large Language Models (LLMs) encode behaviors such as refusal within their activation space, yet identifying these behaviors remains a significant challenge. Existing methods often rely on predefined refusal templates detectable in output…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Vincent Siu , Nicholas Crispino , Zihao Yu , Sam Pan , Zhun Wang , Yang Liu , Dawn Song , Chenguang Wang

Large language models excel at complex instructions yet struggle to deviate from their helpful assistant persona, as post-training instills strong priors that resist conflicting instructions. We introduce system prompt strength, a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Yijiang River Dong , Tiancheng Hu , Zheng Hui , Nigel Collier

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as autonomous decision-makers in strategic settings, yet we have limited tools for understanding their high-level behavioral traits. We use activation steering methods in game-theoretic…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Johnathan Sun , Andrew Zhang

Language models (LMs) have been shown to behave unexpectedly post-deployment. For example, new jailbreaks continually arise, allowing model misuse, despite extensive red-teaming and adversarial training from developers. Given most model…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-25 Asa Cooper Stickland , Alexander Lyzhov , Jacob Pfau , Salsabila Mahdi , Samuel R. Bowman

Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) are becoming essential as a powerful multimodal backbone for real-world applications. However, recent studies show that audio inputs can more easily elicit harmful responses than text, exposing new risks…

Sound · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Weilin Lin , Jianze Li , Hui Xiong , Li Liu

Activation engineering is becoming increasingly popular as a means of online control of large language models (LLMs). In this work, we extend the idea of inference-time steering with vectors that represent a behavioral direction of interest…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-26 Christopher M. Ackerman

Prior work argues that refusal in large language models is mediated by a single activation-space direction, enabling effective steering and ablation. We show that this account is incomplete. Across eleven categories of refusal and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Faaiz Joad , Majd Hawasly , Sabri Boughorbel , Nadir Durrani , Husrev Taha Sencar

Fine-tuning pre-trained language models (LMs) has become the de facto standard in many NLP tasks. Nevertheless, fine-tuned LMs are still prone to robustness issues, such as adversarial robustness and model calibration. Several perspectives…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-12-08 Jaehyung Kim , Yuning Mao , Rui Hou , Hanchao Yu , Davis Liang , Pascale Fung , Qifan Wang , Fuli Feng , Lifu Huang , Madian Khabsa

Sparsity-aware training is an effective approach for transforming large language models (LLMs) into hardware-friendly sparse patterns, thereby reducing latency and memory consumption during inference. In this paper, we propose Continuous…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-01 Weiyu Huang , Yuezhou Hu , Jun Zhu , Jianfei Chen

This work introduces SteerVLM, a lightweight steering module designed to guide Vision-Language Models (VLMs) towards outputs that better adhere to desired instructions. Our approach learns from the latent embeddings of paired prompts…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-10-31 Anushka Sivakumar , Andrew Zhang , Zaber Hakim , Chris Thomas

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable capabilities across various tasks, yet guiding them to follow desired behaviours during inference remains a significant challenge. Activation steering offers a promising method to control the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Weixuan Wang , Minghao Wu , Barry Haddow , Alexandra Birch

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across various real-world tasks. However, they often struggle to fully comprehend and effectively utilize their input contexts, resulting in responses that are unfaithful…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-18 Qingru Zhang , Xiaodong Yu , Chandan Singh , Xiaodong Liu , Liyuan Liu , Jianfeng Gao , Tuo Zhao , Dan Roth , Hao Cheng

Large language models (LLMs) are prone to capturing biases from training corpus, leading to potential negative social impacts. Existing prompt-based debiasing methods exhibit instability due to their sensitivity to prompt changes, while…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Yichen Li , Zhiting Fan , Ruizhe Chen , Xiaotang Gai , Luqi Gong , Yan Zhang , Zuozhu Liu

Refusal-Aware Instruction Tuning (RAIT) enables Large Language Models (LLMs) to refuse to answer unknown questions. By modifying responses of unknown questions in the training data to refusal responses such as "I don't know", RAIT enhances…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-23 Runchuan Zhu , Zhipeng Ma , Jiang Wu , Junyuan Gao , Jiaqi Wang , Dahua Lin , Conghui He

The field of mechanistic interpretability in pre-trained transformer models has demonstrated substantial evidence supporting the ''linear representation hypothesis'', which is the idea that high level concepts are encoded as vectors in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-08 Damjan Kalajdzievski

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate increasing conversational fluency, yet instilling them with nuanced, human-like emotional expression remains a significant challenge. Current alignment techniques often address surface-level output…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Niranjan Chebrolu , Gerard Christopher Yeo , Kokil Jaidka