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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

Large Language Models (LLMs) often exhibit knowledge disparities across languages. Encouraging LLMs to \textit{abstain} when faced with knowledge gaps is a promising strategy to reduce hallucinations in multilingual settings. Current…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Yuxi Sun , Aoqi Zuo , Wei Gao , Jing Ma

Steering vectors have emerged as a lightweight and effective approach for aligning large language models (LLMs) at inference time, enabling modulation over model behaviors by shifting LLM representations towards a target behavior. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Soham Gadgil , Chris Lin , Su-In Lee

Object hallucination remains a primary obstacle to the reliable deployment of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). Current inference-time mitigation methods mainly assume hallucinations stem from visual neglect, steering models to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Jingwen Wu , Xijun Zhang , Ge Song

Autonomous, goal-driven agents powered by LLMs have recently emerged as promising tools for solving challenging problems without the need for task-specific finetuned models that can be expensive to procure. Currently, the design and…

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

Refusal on harmful prompts is a key safety behaviour in instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs), yet the internal causes of this behaviour remain poorly understood. We study two public instruction-tuned models, Gemma-2-2B-IT and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-29 Nirmalendu Prakash , Yeo Wei Jie , Amir Abdullah , Ranjan Satapathy , Erik Cambria , Roy Ka Wei Lee

Safety alignment in large language models (LLMs) induces over-refusals -- where LLMs decline benign requests due to aggressive safety filters. We analyze this phenomenon in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), where both the query intent…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Utsav Maskey , Mark Dras , Usman Naseem

Large language models (LLMs) often generate fluent but factually incorrect statements despite having access to relevant evidence, a failure mode rooted in how they allocate attention between contextual and parametric knowledge.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Kenji Sahay , Snigdha Pandya , Rohan Nagale , Anna Lin , Shikhar Shiromani , Kevin Zhu , Dev Sunishchal

Latent steering exploits internal representations of Large Language Models (LLMs) to guide generation, yet interventions on dense states can entangle distinct semantic features. In this paper, we investigate attention query activations as a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Sumanta Bhattacharyya , Pedram Rooshenas

Accent variability remains a major errors in automatic speech recognition, yet most adaptation methods rely on parameter fine-tuning without understanding where accent information is encoded. We treat accent variation as an interpretable…

Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-03-09 Jinuo Sun , Yang Xiao , Sung Kyun Chung , Qiuchi Hu , Gongping Huang , Eun-Jung Holden , Ting Dang

With the emergence of large language models (LLMs) as a powerful class of generative artificial intelligence (AI), their use in tutoring has become increasingly prominent. Prior works on LLM-based tutoring typically learn a single tutor…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Jaewook Lee , Alexander Scarlatos , Simon Woodhead , Andrew Lan

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have resulted in increasingly anthropomorphic language concerning the ability of LLMs to reason. Whether reasoning in LLMs should be understood to be inherently different is, however,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-28 Bertram Højer , Oliver Jarvis , Stefan Heinrich

We present Fusion Steering, an activation steering methodology that improves factual accuracy in large language models (LLMs) for question-answering (QA) tasks. This approach introduces flexible steering configurations, including full-layer…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Waldemar Chang , Alhassan Yasin

In this work, we present Conditional Adversarial Latent Models (CALM), an approach for generating diverse and directable behaviors for user-controlled interactive virtual characters. Using imitation learning, CALM learns a representation of…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-05-04 Chen Tessler , Yoni Kasten , Yunrong Guo , Shie Mannor , Gal Chechik , Xue Bin Peng

Large Language Models (LLMs) encode vast amounts of parametric knowledge during pre-training. As world knowledge evolves, effective deployment increasingly depends on their ability to faithfully follow externally retrieved context. When…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Nikhil Anand , Shwetha Somasundaram , Anirudh Phukan , Apoorv Saxena , Koyel Mukherjee

Large language models have transformed AI, yet reliably controlling their outputs remains a challenge. This paper explores activation engineering, where outputs of pre-trained LLMs are controlled by manipulating their activations at…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2025-05-13 Joris Postmus , Steven Abreu

Vision-language model (VLM)-based web agents increasingly power high-stakes selection tasks like content recommendation or product ranking by combining multimodal perception with preference reasoning. Recent studies reveal that these agents…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Tanqiu Jiang , Min Bai , Nikolaos Pappas , Yanjun Qi , Sandesh Swamy

As the development and application of Large Language Models (LLMs) continue to advance rapidly, enhancing their trustworthiness and aligning them with human preferences has become a critical area of research. Traditional methods rely…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-06 Yuxin Xiao , Chaoqun Wan , Yonggang Zhang , Wenxiao Wang , Binbin Lin , Xiaofei He , Xu Shen , Jieping Ye

Large Multi-Modal Models (LMMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities as general-purpose chatbots able to engage in conversations about visual inputs. However, their responses are influenced by societal biases present in their training…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-09-19 Neale Ratzlaff , Matthew Lyle Olson , Musashi Hinck , Estelle Aflalo , Shao-Yen Tseng , Vasudev Lal , Phillip Howard