Related papers: Towards Reliable Evaluation of Behavior Steering I…
Activation engineering is becoming increasingly popular as a means of online control of large language models (LLMs). In this work, we extend the idea of inference-time steering with vectors that represent a behavioral direction of interest…
Representation Engineering (RepE) is a novel paradigm for controlling the behavior of LLMs. Unlike traditional approaches that modify inputs or fine-tune the model, RepE directly manipulates the model's internal representations. As a…
With the growing complexity and capability of large language models, a need to understand model reasoning has emerged, often motivated by an underlying goal of controlling and aligning models. While numerous interpretability and steering…
The ability to steer AI behavior is crucial to preventing its long term dangerous and catastrophic potential. Representation Engineering (RepE) has emerged as a novel, powerful method to steer internal model behaviors, such as "honesty", at…
We introduce SteeringSafety, a systematic framework for evaluating representation steering methods across seven safety perspectives spanning 17 datasets. While prior work highlights general capabilities of representation steering, we…
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…
Large language models are increasingly used to represent human opinions, values, or beliefs, and their steerability towards these ideals is an active area of research. Existing work focuses predominantly on aligning marginal response…
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…
Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have resulted in increasingly anthropomorphic language concerning the ability of LLMs to reason. Whether reasoning in LLMs should be understood to be inherently different is, however,…
This paper investigates how Large Language Models (LLMs) represent non-English tokens -- a question that remains underexplored despite recent progress. We propose a lightweight intervention method using representation steering, where a…
Model steering, which involves intervening on hidden representations at inference time, has emerged as a lightweight alternative to finetuning for precisely controlling large language models. While steering efficacy has been widely studied,…
Imitation learning techniques have been shown to be highly effective in real-world control scenarios, such as robotics. However, these approaches not only suffer from compounding error issues but also require human experts to provide…
Language models often exhibit undesirable behavior, e.g., generating toxic or gender-biased text. In the case of neural language models, an encoding of the undesirable behavior is often present in the model's representations. Thus, one…
Causal inference is central to many areas of artificial intelligence, including complex reasoning, planning, knowledge-base construction, robotics, explanation, and fairness. An active community of researchers develops and enhances…
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…
Schema-guided reasoning pipelines ask LLMs to produce explicit intermediate structures -- rubrics, checklists, verification queries -- before committing to a final decision. But do these structures causally determine the output, or merely…
Intervention is one of the most representative and widely used methods for understanding the internal representations of large language models (LLMs). However, existing intervention methods are confined to linear interventions grounded in…
Solving complex, long-horizon robotic manipulation tasks requires a deep understanding of physical interactions, reasoning about their long-term consequences, and precise high-level planning. Vision-Language Models (VLMs) offer a general…
Latent space steering methods provide a practical approach to controlling large language models by applying steering vectors to intermediate activations, guiding outputs toward desired behaviors while avoiding retraining. Despite their…
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…