Related papers: Activation Scaling for Steering and Interpreting L…

Activation-based control steers large language models (LLMs) by intervening on their internal representations during inference, and has emerged as an effective paradigm for controlling behaviors such as persona and style. However, existing…

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…

With the rapid advancement of Vision Language Models (VLMs), refusal mechanisms have become a critical component for ensuring responsible and safe model behavior. However, existing refusal strategies are largely \textit{one-size-fits-all}…

A growing body of research has demonstrated that the behavior of large language models can be effectively controlled at inference time by directly modifying their internal states, either through vector additions to their activations or…

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…

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,…

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…

We develop task scaling laws and model ladders to predict the individual task performance of pretrained language models (LMs) in the overtrained setting. Standard power laws for language modeling loss cannot accurately model task…

Modern statistical machine learning (SML) methods share a major limitation with the early approaches to AI: there is no scalable way to adapt them to new domains. Human learning solves this in part by leveraging a rich, shared, updateable…

Language models significantly benefit from context tokens, such as prompts or scratchpads. They perform better when prompted with informative instructions, and they acquire new reasoning capabilities by generating a scratch-pad before…

Inference-time steering offers a promising way to control language models (LMs) without retraining. However, standard approaches typically rely on activation addition, which inevitably alters the hidden-state magnitudes raising concerns…

Human reasoning is shaped by resource rationality -- optimizing performance under constraints. Recently, inference-time scaling has emerged as a powerful paradigm to improve the reasoning performance of Large Language Models by expanding…

Controlling the behaviors of large language models (LLM) is fundamental to their safety alignment and reliable deployment. However, existing steering methods are primarily driven by empirical insights and lack theoretical performance…

Symbolic planners can discover a sequence of actions from initial to goal states given expert-defined, domain-specific logical action semantics. Large Language Models (LLMs) can directly generate such sequences, but limitations in reasoning…

The field of large language models (LLMs) has grown rapidly in recent years, driven by the desire for better efficiency, interpretability, and safe use. Building on the novel approach of "activation engineering," this study explores…

Inference-time scaling can enhance the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) on complex problems that benefit from step-by-step problem solving. Although lengthening generated scratchpads has proven effective for…

As large language models (LLMs) evolve in complexity and capability, the efficacy of less widely deployed alignment techniques are uncertain. Building on previous work on activation steering and contrastive activation addition (CAA), this…

Recent reasoning models, such as OpenAI's O1 series, have demonstrated exceptional performance on complex reasoning tasks and revealed new test-time scaling laws. Inspired by this, many people have been studying how to train models to…

Steering vectors offer a training-free mechanism for controlling reasoning behaviors in large language models, but constructing effective vectors requires identifying genuine behavioral signals in the model's hidden states. For behaviors…

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…