Related papers: Activation Scaling for Steering and Interpreting L…
Research in machine learning has successfully developed algorithms to build accurate classification models. However, in many real-world applications, such as healthcare, customer satisfaction, and environment protection, we want to be able…
Transformers achieve unrivalled performance in modelling language, but remain inefficient in terms of memory and time complexity. A possible remedy is to reduce the sequence length in the intermediate layers by pooling fixed-length segments…
Large language models (LLMs) exhibit persistent miscalibration, especially after instruction tuning and preference alignment. Modified training objectives can improve calibration, but retraining is expensive. Inference-time steering offers…
Safety alignment is indispensable for Large Language Models (LLMs) to defend threats from malicious instructions. However, recent researches reveal safety-aligned LLMs prone to reject benign queries due to the exaggerated safety issue,…
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…
There has been increasing interest in evaluations of language models for a variety of risks and characteristics. Evaluations relying on natural language understanding for grading can often be performed at scale by using other language…
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…
Building pluralistic AI requires designing models that are able to be shaped to represent a wide range of value systems and cultures. Achieving this requires first being able to evaluate the degree to which a given model is capable of…
Teacher education requires deliberate practice with learners who exhibit identifiable strengths, weaknesses, and partial mastery. Large language models could support such practice by simulating students with known skill components, enabling…
Accounts of human language processing have long appealed to implicit ``situation models'' that enrich comprehension with relevant but unstated world knowledge. Here, we apply causal intervention techniques to recent transformer models to…
Some actions must be executed in different ways depending on the context. For example, wiping away marker requires vigorous force while wiping away almonds requires more gentle force. In this paper we provide a model where an agent learns…
The increasing adoption of machine learning tools has led to calls for accountability via model interpretability. But what does it mean for a machine learning model to be interpretable by humans, and how can this be assessed? We focus on…
Large language models (LLMs) can be controlled at inference time through prompts (in-context learning) and internal activations (activation steering). Different accounts have been proposed to explain these methods, yet their common goal of…
Large language models possess strong chemical reasoning capabilities, making them effective molecular editors. However, property-relevant information is implicitly entangled across their dense hidden states, providing no explicit handle for…
Activation steering controls language model behavior by adding directions to internal representations at inference time, but standard residual-stream steering can fail in stateful dialogue. We identify KV-cache contamination as a key…
Different activation functions work best for different deep learning models. To exploit this, we leverage recent advancements in gradient-based search techniques for neural architectures to efficiently identify high-performing activation…
With the advancement in generative language models, the selection of prompts has gained significant attention in recent years. A prompt is an instruction or description provided by the user, serving as a guide for the generative language…
Sampling-based search, a simple paradigm for utilizing test-time compute, involves generating multiple candidate responses and selecting the best one -- typically by having models self-verify each response for correctness. In this paper, we…
An unintended consequence of the vast pretraining of Large Language Models (LLMs) is the verbatim memorization of fragments of their training data, which may contain sensitive or copyrighted information. In recent years, unlearning has…
The performance of active learning algorithms can be improved in two ways. The often used and intuitive way is by reducing the overall error rate within the test set. The second way is to ensure that correct predictions are not forgotten…