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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

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

Large Language Models (LLMs) represent an advanced evolution of earlier, simpler language models. They boast enhanced abilities to handle complex language patterns and generate coherent text, images, audios, and videos. Furthermore, they…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-03-01 Jun Huang , Jiawei Zhang , Qi Wang , Weihong Han , Yanchun Zhang

The ability to follow instructions is crucial for numerous real-world applications of language models. In pursuit of deeper insights and more powerful capabilities, we derive instruction-specific vector representations from language models…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-15 Alessandro Stolfo , Vidhisha Balachandran , Safoora Yousefi , Eric Horvitz , Besmira Nushi

Safety for Large Language Models (LLMs) has been an ongoing research focus since their emergence and is even more relevant nowadays with the increasing capacity of those models. Currently, there are several guardrails in place for all…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-25 Eduard Stefan Dinuta , Iustin Sirbu , Traian Rebedea

Aligning Large Language Models (LLM) to address subjectivity and nuanced preference levels requires adequate flexibility and control, which can be a resource-intensive and time-consuming procedure. Existing training-time alignment methods…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive performance in natural language tasks, but their outputs can exhibit undesirable attributes or biases. Existing methods for steering LLMs toward desired attributes often assume unbiased…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-05 Zhixuan Chu , Yan Wang , Longfei Li , Zhibo Wang , Zhan Qin , Kui Ren

Recent work exploring the capabilities of pre-trained large language models (LLMs) has demonstrated their ability to act as general pattern machines by completing complex token sequences representing a wide array of tasks, including…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2024-03-25 Seyed Parsa Neshaei , Richard Lee Davis , Adam Hazimeh , Bojan Lazarevski , Pierre Dillenbourg , Tanja Käser

Recent studies on the safety alignment of large language models (LLMs) have revealed that existing approaches often operate superficially, leaving models vulnerable to various adversarial attacks. Despite their significance, these studies…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-06-02 Jianwei Li , Jung-Eun Kim

Large language models (LLMs) excel in various capabilities but pose safety risks such as generating harmful content and misinformation, even after safety alignment. In this paper, we explore the inner mechanisms of safety alignment through…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Jianhui Chen , Xiaozhi Wang , Zijun Yao , Yushi Bai , Lei Hou , Juanzi Li

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

Steering methods have emerged as effective and targeted tools for guiding large language models' (LLMs) behavior without modifying their parameters. Multimodal large language models (MLLMs), however, do not currently enjoy the same suite of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-21 Woody Haosheng Gan , Deqing Fu , Julian Asilis , Ollie Liu , Dani Yogatama , Vatsal Sharan , Robin Jia , Willie Neiswanger

Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve remarkable performance through pretraining on extensive data. This enables efficient adaptation to diverse downstream tasks. However, the lack of interpretability in their underlying mechanisms limits…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Xintong Wang , Jingheng Pan , Liang Ding , Longyue Wang , Longqin Jiang , Xingshan Li , Chris Biemann

Robust alignment guardrails for large language models (LLMs) are becoming increasingly important with their widespread application. In contrast to previous studies, we demonstrate that inference-time activation interventions can bypass…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-26 Paul Darm , Annalisa Riccardi

Multilingual Large Language Models (LLMs) often exhibit hallucinations such as unintended code-switching, reducing reliability in downstream tasks. We propose latent-space language steering, a lightweight inference-time method that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Andrey Goncharov , Nikolai Kondusov , Alexey Zaytsev

Pedestrian safety is a critical component of urban mobility and is strongly influenced by the interactions between pedestrian decision-making and driver yielding behavior at crosswalks. Modeling driver--pedestrian interactions at…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-25 Yicheng Yang , Zixian Li , Jean Paul Bizimana , Niaz Zafri , Yongfeng Dong , Tianyi Li

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

Large Language Models (LLMs) often generate inconsistent responses when prompted with semantically equivalent paraphrased inputs. Recently, activation steering, a technique that modulates LLMs' behaviours by adjusting their latent…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-23 Jingyuan Yang , Rongjun Li , Weixuan Wang , Ziyu Zhou , Zhiyong Feng , Wei Peng

Model steering represents a powerful technique that dynamically aligns large language models (LLMs) with human preferences during inference. However, conventional model-steering methods rely heavily on externally annotated data, not only…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-15 Rongyi Zhu , Yuhui Wang , Tanqiu Jiang , Jiacheng Liang , Ting Wang

As large language models (LLMs) see wider real-world use, understanding and mitigating their unsafe behaviors is critical. Interpretation techniques can reveal causes of unsafe outputs and guide safety, but such connections with safety are…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-06-09 Seongmin Lee , Aeree Cho , Grace C. Kim , ShengYun Peng , Mansi Phute , Duen Horng Chau