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Related papers: Refusal in LLMs is an Affine Function

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Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at code generation but remain heavily reliant on large-scale annotated solutions and verification-based supervision, which constrains scalability and hinders sustained self-improvement. Recent…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Yixu Huang , Xinglei Yu , Zhongyu Wei

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated that fine-tuning and human alignment can render LLMs harmless. In practice, such "harmlessness" behavior is mainly achieved by training models to reject harmful requests,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-25 Shengyun Si , Xinpeng Wang , Guangyao Zhai , Nassir Navab , Barbara Plank

Mitigating hallucinations in Large Language Models (LLMs) is critical for their reliable deployment. Existing methods typically fine-tune LLMs to abstain from answering questions beyond their knowledge scope. However, these methods often…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-29 Hao An , Yang Xu

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-13 Eric Bigelow , Daniel Wurgaft , YingQiao Wang , Noah Goodman , Tomer Ullman , Hidenori Tanaka , Ekdeep Singh Lubana

Recent work has shown that language models' refusal behavior is primarily encoded in a single direction in their latent space, making it vulnerable to targeted attacks. Although Latent Adversarial Training (LAT) attempts to improve…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-29 Alexandra Abbas , Nora Petrova , Helios Ael Lyons , Natalia Perez-Campanero

Pre-trained large language models (LLMs) capture procedural knowledge about the world. Recent work has leveraged LLM's ability to generate abstract plans to simplify challenging control tasks, either by action scoring, or action modeling…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-09 Yue Wu , So Yeon Min , Yonatan Bisk , Ruslan Salakhutdinov , Amos Azaria , Yuanzhi Li , Tom Mitchell , Shrimai Prabhumoye

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive language understanding and generation capabilities, enabling them to answer a wide range of questions across various domains. However, these models are not flawless and often produce…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-23 Lang Cao

Deterministically controlling the target generation language of large multilingual language models (LLMs) remains a fundamental challenge, particularly in zero-shot settings where neither explicit language prompts nor fine-tuning are…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-17 Cheng-Ting Chou , George Liu , Jessica Sun , Cole Blondin , Kevin Zhu , Vasu Sharma , Sean O'Brien

The performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) is highly sensitive to the prompts they are given. Drawing inspiration from the field of prompt optimization, this study investigates the potential for enhancing Automated Essay Scoring (AES)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-13 Keno Harada , Lui Yoshida , Takeshi Kojima , Yusuke Iwasawa , Yutaka Matsuo

Large pre-trained language models contain societal biases and carry along these biases to downstream tasks. Current in-processing bias mitigation approaches (like adversarial training) impose debiasing by updating a model's parameters,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-21 Deepak Kumar , Oleg Lesota , George Zerveas , Daniel Cohen , Carsten Eickhoff , Markus Schedl , Navid Rekabsaz

Refusal mechanisms in large language models (LLMs) are essential for ensuring safety. Recent research has revealed that refusal behavior can be mediated by a single direction in activation space, enabling targeted interventions to bypass…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-26 Xinpeng Wang , Mingyang Wang , Yihong Liu , Hinrich Schütze , Barbara Plank

Current safety evaluations of language models rely on benchmark-based assessments that may miss localized vulnerabilities. We present RepIt, a simple and data-efficient framework for isolating concept-specific representations in LM…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-22 Vincent Siu , Nathan W. Henry , Nicholas Crispino , Yang Liu , Dawn Song , Chenguang Wang

Safety-aligned language models refuse harmful requests through learned refusal behaviors encoded in their internal representations. Recent activation-based jailbreaking methods circumvent these safety mechanisms by applying orthogonal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Geraldin Nanfack , Eugene Belilovsky , Elvis Dohmatob

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant success across various domains. However, their application in complex decision-making tasks frequently necessitates intricate prompt engineering or fine-tuning, leading to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-05-06 Wanpeng Zhang , Zongqing Lu

Recent Active Learning (AL) approaches in Natural Language Processing (NLP) proposed using off-the-shelf pretrained language models (LMs). In this paper, we argue that these LMs are not adapted effectively to the downstream task during AL…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-03-03 Katerina Margatina , Loïc Barrault , Nikolaos Aletras

Large language models (LLMs) have showcased remarkable potential across various tasks by conditioning on prompts. However, the quality of different human-written prompts leads to substantial discrepancies in LLMs' performance, and improving…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-17 Yihong Dong , Kangcheng Luo , Xue Jiang , Zhi Jin , Ge Li

Fine-grained word meaning resolution remains a critical challenge for neural language models (NLMs) as they often overfit to global sentence representations, failing to capture local semantic details. We propose a novel adversarial training…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-17 Jader Martins Camboim de Sá , Jooyoung Lee , Cédric Pruski , Marcos Da Silveira

By conditioning on natural language instructions, large language models (LLMs) have displayed impressive capabilities as general-purpose computers. However, task performance depends significantly on the quality of the prompt used to steer…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-13 Yongchao Zhou , Andrei Ioan Muresanu , Ziwen Han , Keiran Paster , Silviu Pitis , Harris Chan , Jimmy Ba

As an effective tool for eliciting the power of Large Language Models (LLMs), prompting has recently demonstrated unprecedented abilities across a variety of complex tasks. To further improve the performance, prompt ensemble has attracted…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-08-24 Chenrui Zhang , Lin Liu , Jinpeng Wang , Chuyuan Wang , Xiao Sun , Hongyu Wang , Mingchen Cai

In this paper we present the first investigation into the effectiveness of Large Language Models (LLMs) for Failure Mode Classification (FMC). FMC, the task of automatically labelling an observation with a corresponding failure mode code,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-09-18 Michael Stewart , Melinda Hodkiewicz , Sirui Li