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Related papers: Representation Tuning

200 papers

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human objectives is crucial for real-world applications. However, fine-tuning LLMs for alignment often suffers from unstable training and requires substantial computing resources. Test-time…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-11-05 Lingkai Kong , Haorui Wang , Wenhao Mu , Yuanqi Du , Yuchen Zhuang , Yifei Zhou , Yue Song , Rongzhi Zhang , Kai Wang , Chao Zhang

Adapting models to a language that was only partially present in the pre-training data requires fine-tuning, which is expensive in terms of both data and computational resources. As an alternative to fine-tuning, we explore the potential of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-28 Daniel Scalena , Elisabetta Fersini , Malvina Nissim

Large language models (LLMs) have transformed the way we access information. These models are often tuned to refuse to comply with requests that are considered harmful and to produce responses that better align with the preferences of those…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-12 Hannah Cyberey , David Evans

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-10 Duy Nguyen , Archiki Prasad , Elias Stengel-Eskin , Mohit Bansal

Language model alignment has become an important component of AI safety, allowing safe interactions between humans and language models, by enhancing desired behaviors and inhibiting undesired ones. It is often done by tuning the model or…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Yotam Wolf , Noam Wies , Dorin Shteyman , Binyamin Rothberg , Yoav Levine , Amnon Shashua

Controlling undesirable Large Language Model (LLM) behaviors, such as the generation of unsafe content or failing to adhere to safety guidelines, often relies on costly fine-tuning. Activation steering provides an alternative for…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Amr Hegazy , Mostafa Elhoushi , Amr Alanwar

Large-language models are capable of completing a variety of tasks, but remain unpredictable and intractable. Representation engineering seeks to resolve this problem through a new approach utilizing samples of contrasting inputs to detect…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-02-26 Lukasz Bartoszcze , Sarthak Munshi , Bryan Sukidi , Jennifer Yen , Zejia Yang , David Williams-King , Linh Le , Kosi Asuzu , Carsten Maple

The mechanisms by which reasoning training reshapes LLMs' internal computations remain unclear. We study lightweight steering vectors inserted into the base model's residual stream and trained with a reinforcement-learning objective. These…

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 Language Models (LLMs) are trained on diverse and often conflicting knowledge spanning multiple domains and time periods. Some of this knowledge is only valid within specific temporal contexts, such as answering the question, "Who is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Sanjay Govindan , Maurice Pagnucco , Yang Song

Inference-time steering aims to alter a large language model's (LLM's) responses without changing its parameters, but a central challenge is identifying the internal modules that most strongly govern the target behavior. Existing approaches…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Li-Ming Zhan , Bo Liu , Chengqiang Xie , Jiannong Cao , Xiao-Ming Wu

Activation steering is a method for controlling Large Language Model (LLM) behavior by intervening in its internal representations to increase the alignment with a specific target feature direction. However, standard interventions, such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Tam Nguyen , Tu Anh Nguyen , Sina Alemohammad , Richard G. Baraniuk

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

Large language models (LLMs) often exhibit undesirable behaviours, such as generating untruthful or biased content. Editing their internal representations has been shown to be effective in mitigating such behaviours on top of the existing…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-05 Yifu Qiu , Zheng Zhao , Yftah Ziser , Anna Korhonen , Edoardo M. Ponti , Shay B. Cohen

Large language models (LLMs) have become proficient at sophisticated code-generation tasks, yet remain ineffective at reliably detecting or avoiding code vulnerabilities. Does this deficiency stem from insufficient learning about code…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-07-15 Weichen Yu , Ravi Mangal , Terry Zhuo , Matt Fredrikson , Corina S. Pasareanu

Large language models (LLMs) require precise behavior control for safe and effective deployment across diverse applications. Activation steering offers a promising approach for LLMs' behavioral control. We focus on the question of how…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Tetiana Bas , Krystian Novak

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

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

Large Language Models (LLMs) face persistent and evolving trustworthiness issues, motivating developers to seek automated and flexible repair methods that enable convenient deployment across diverse scenarios. Existing repair methods like…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-08-12 Changqing Li , Tianlin Li , Xiaohan Zhang , Aishan Liu , Li Pan

Steering vectors are a lightweight method for controlling language model behavior by adding a learned bias to the activations at inference time. Although effective on average, steering effect sizes vary across samples and are unreliable for…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-23 Joschka Braun