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Sparse Autoencoder (SAE) has emerged as a powerful tool for mechanistic interpretability of large language models. Recent works apply SAE to protein language models (PLMs), aiming to extract and analyze biologically meaningful features from…

Quantitative Methods · Quantitative Biology 2026-01-21 Xiangyu Liu , Haodi Lei , Yi Liu , Yang Liu , Wei Hu

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Diancheng Kang , Zheyuan Liu , Ningshan Ma , Yue Huang , Zhaoxuan Tan , Meng Jiang

Activation steering has emerged as a promising approach for efficiently adapting large language models (LLMs) to downstream behaviors. However, most existing steering methods rely on a single static direction per task or concept, making…

As large language models (LLMs) improve in their capacity to serve as personal AI assistants, their ability to output uniquely tailored, personalized responses that align with the soft preferences of their users is essential for enhancing…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2025-05-15 Jessica Y. Bo , Tianyu Xu , Ishan Chatterjee , Katrina Passarella-Ward , Achin Kulshrestha , D Shin

Large language models (LLMs) require precise behavior control for safe and effective deployment across diverse applications. Activation steering offers a promising approach for LLMs' behavioral control. We focus on the question of how…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Tetiana Bas , Krystian Novak

Activation steering methods enable inference-time control of large language model (LLM) behavior without retraining, but current approaches face a fundamental trade-off: sample-efficient methods suboptimally capture steering signals from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-09 Kartik Sharma , Rakshit S. Trivedi

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

Activation steering is a method for controlling Large Language Model (LLM) behavior by intervening in its internal representations to increase the alignment with a specific target feature direction. However, standard interventions, such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Tam Nguyen , Tu Anh Nguyen , Sina Alemohammad , Richard G. Baraniuk

Large language models have transformed AI, yet reliably controlling their outputs remains a challenge. This paper explores activation engineering, where outputs of pre-trained LLMs are controlled by manipulating their activations at…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2025-05-13 Joris Postmus , Steven Abreu

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

Large language models (LLMs) display recognizable political leanings, yet they vary significantly in their ability to represent a political orientation consistently. In this paper, we define ideological depth as (i) a model's ability to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-17 Shariar Kabir , Kevin Esterling , Yue Dong

Large language models have enabled automated algorithm design (AAD) by generating optimization algorithms directly from natural-language prompts. While evolutionary frameworks such as LLaMEA demonstrate strong exploratory capabilities…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Niki van Stein , Anna V. Kononova , Lars Kotthoff , Thomas Bäck

Post-training adaptation of language models is commonly achieved through parameter updates or input-based methods such as fine-tuning, parameter-efficient adaptation, and prompting. In parallel, a growing body of work modifies internal…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Simon Ostermann , Daniil Gurgurov , Tanja Baeumel , Michael A. Hedderich , Sebastian Lapuschkin , Wojciech Samek , Vera Schmitt

We propose affine concept editing (ACE) as an approach for steering language models' behavior by intervening directly in activations. We begin with an affine decomposition of model activation vectors and show that prior methods for steering…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-29 Thomas Marshall , Adam Scherlis , Nora Belrose

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a popular tool for interpreting the hidden states of large language models (LLMs). By learning to reconstruct activations from a sparse bottleneck layer, SAEs discover interpretable features from…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-09-19 Matthew Lyle Olson , Musashi Hinck , Neale Ratzlaff , Changbai Li , Phillip Howard , Vasudev Lal , Shao-Yen Tseng

Activation steering is a practical post-training model alignment technique to enhance the utility of Large Language Models (LLMs). Prior to deploying a model as a service, developers can steer a pre-trained model toward specific behavioral…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Chen Xiong , Zhiyuan He , Pin-Yu Chen , Ching-Yun Ko , Tsung-Yi Ho

Large Language Models (LLMs) are powerful and widely adopted, but their practical impact is limited by the well-known hallucination phenomenon. While recent hallucination detection methods have made notable progress, we find most of them…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Boshui Chen , Zhaoxin Fan , Ke Wang , Zhiying Leng , Faguo Wu , Hongwei Zheng , Yifan Sun , Wenjun Wu

Steering language model generation toward desired textual properties is essential for practical deployment, and inference-time methods are particularly appealing because they enable controllable generation without retraining. Recent work…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Hyeseon An , Yo-Sub Han

Adapting models to a language that was only partially present in the pre-training data requires fine-tuning, which is expensive in terms of both data and computational resources. As an alternative to fine-tuning, we explore the potential of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-28 Daniel Scalena , Elisabetta Fersini , Malvina Nissim

Protein Language Models (PLMs), pre-trained on extensive evolutionary data from natural proteins, have emerged as indispensable tools for protein design. While powerful, PLMs often struggle to produce proteins with precisely specified…

Biomolecules · Quantitative Biology 2025-09-15 Long-Kai Huang , Rongyi Zhu , Bing He , Jianhua Yao