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Related papers: Representation Tuning

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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

Controlling multiple behavioral attributes in large language models (LLMs) at inference time is a challenging problem due to interference between attributes and the limitations of linear steering methods, which assume additive behavior in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Narmeen Oozeer , Luke Marks , Shreyans Jain , Fazl Barez , Amirali Abdullah

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit reasoning biases, often conflating content plausibility with formal logical validity. This can lead to wrong inferences in critical domains, where plausible arguments are incorrectly deemed logically…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Marco Valentino , Geonhee Kim , Dhairya Dalal , Zhixue Zhao , André Freitas

Activation engineering enables precise control over Large Language Models (LLMs) without the computational cost of fine-tuning. However, existing methods deriving vectors from static activation differences are susceptible to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Xinyan Jiang , Wenjing Yu , Di Wang , Lijie Hu

Activation steering is a promising technique for controlling LLM behavior by adding semantically meaningful vectors directly into a model's hidden states during inference. It is often framed as a precise, interpretable, and potentially…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Anton Korznikov , Andrey Galichin , Alexey Dontsov , Oleg Y. Rogov , Ivan Oseledets , Elena Tutubalina

Large language models (LLMs) are now used in multi-turn workflows, but we still lack a clear way to measure when iteration helps and when it hurts. We present an evaluation framework for iterative refinement that spans ideation, code, and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-16 Shashidhar Reddy Javaji , Bhavul Gauri , Zining Zhu

Recent studies have indicated that Large Language Models (LLMs) harbor an inherent understanding of truthfulness, yet often fail to consistently express it and generate false statements. This gap between "knowing" and "telling" poses a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-27 Tianlong Wang , Xianfeng Jiao , Yinghao Zhu , Zhongzhi Chen , Yifan He , Xu Chu , Junyi Gao , Yasha Wang , Liantao Ma

Despite significant progress in alignment, large language models (LLMs) remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks that elicit harmful behaviors. Activation steering techniques offer a promising inference-time intervention approach, but…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-28 Quy-Anh Dang , Chris Ngo

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-29 John Seon Keun Yi , Aaron Mueller , Dokyun Lee

Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely used by software engineers for programming tasks. However, research shows that LLMs often lack a deep understanding of program semantics. Even minor changes to syntax, such as renaming variables, can…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-06 Francesca Lucchetti , Arjun Guha

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly serve as automated evaluators, yet they suffer from "self-preference bias": a tendency to favor their own outputs over those of other models. This bias undermines fairness and reliability in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-05 Dani Roytburg , Matthew Bozoukov , Matthew Nguyen , Jou Barzdukas , Simon Fu , Narmeen Oozeer

Activation steering methods are widely used to control large language model (LLM) behavior and are often interpreted as revealing meaningful internal representations. This interpretation assumes that steering directions are identifiable and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Sohan Venkatesh , Ashish Mahendran Kurapath

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-06 Geert Heyman , Frederik Vandeputte

Activation-based steering enables Large Language Models (LLMs) to exhibit targeted behaviors by intervening on intermediate activations without retraining. Despite its widespread use, the mechanistic factors that govern when steering…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-13 Mehdi Jafari , Hao Xue , Flora Salim

With the rapid expansion of large language models (LLMs), the demand for memory and computational resources has grown significantly. Recent advances in LLM pruning aim to reduce the size and computational cost of these models. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Zhendong Mi , Zhenglun Kong , Geng Yuan , Shaoyi Huang

Large language models are increasingly used as behavioral simulators, but it remains unclear when their outputs reflect human-like cognitive mechanisms rather than prompt-sensitive surface patterns. We study this question through the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Ciarán Walsh , Emilio Barkett

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-12-08 Ole Jorgensen , Dylan Cope , Nandi Schoots , Murray Shanahan

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have led to the development of thinking language models that generate extensive internal reasoning chains before producing responses. While these models achieve improved performance,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-23 Constantin Venhoff , Iván Arcuschin , Philip Torr , Arthur Conmy , Neel Nanda

The success of powerful open source Large Language Models (LLMs) has enabled the community to create a vast collection of post-trained models adapted to specific tasks and domains. However, navigating and understanding these models remains…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-05 Zhiqiu Xu , Amish Sethi , Mayur Naik , Ser-Nam Lim

While large language models (LLMs) have seen unprecedented advancements in capabilities and applications across a variety of use-cases, safety alignment of these models is still an area of active research. The fragile nature of LLMs, even…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-03 Amrita Bhattacharjee , Shaona Ghosh , Traian Rebedea , Christopher Parisien