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Related papers: LF-Steering: Latent Feature Activation Steering fo…

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Latent steering exploits internal representations of Large Language Models (LLMs) to guide generation, yet interventions on dense states can entangle distinct semantic features. In this paper, we investigate attention query activations as a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Sumanta Bhattacharyya , Pedram Rooshenas

Controlling multiple behavioral attributes in large language models (LLMs) at inference time is a challenging problem due to interference between attributes and the limitations of linear steering methods, which assume additive behavior in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Narmeen Oozeer , Luke Marks , Shreyans Jain , Fazl Barez , Amirali Abdullah

Large language models (LLMs) excel at handling human queries, but they can occasionally generate flawed or unexpected responses. Understanding their internal states is crucial for understanding their successes, diagnosing their failures,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-24 Xuansheng Wu , Jiayi Yuan , Wenlin Yao , Xiaoming Zhai , Ninghao Liu

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

Recent work in activation steering has demonstrated the potential to better control the outputs of Large Language Models (LLMs), but it involves finding steering vectors. This is difficult because engineers do not typically know how…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-12-08 Ole Jorgensen , Dylan Cope , Nandi Schoots , Murray Shanahan

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 (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

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Yingdong Shi , Ruiming Zhang , Changming Li , Zhiyu Yang , Kaixing Zhang , Jingyi Yu , Kan Ren

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has improved the reasoning performance of large language models (LLMs), but it remains unclear why it works and whether it is the unique mechanism for triggering reasoning in large language models. In this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Zhenghao He , Guangzhi Xiong , Bohan Liu , Sanchit Sinha , Aidong Zhang

The memorization of training data by Large Language Models (LLMs) poses significant risks, including privacy leaks and the regurgitation of copyrighted content. Activation steering, a technique that directly intervenes in model activations,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-11 Manan Suri , Nishit Anand , Amisha Bhaskar

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) to adapt to evolving safety policies is costly and impractical. Mechanistic interpretability enables inference-time control through latent activation steering, yet its potential for precise,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Shaona Ghosh , Amrita Bhattacharjee , Yftah Ziser , Christopher Parisien

Inference-time LLM alignment methods, particularly activation steering, offer an alternative to fine-tuning by directly modifying activations during generation. Existing methods, however, often rely on non-anticipative interventions that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-22 Julian Skifstad , Xinyue Annie Yang , Glen Chou

Large Language Models exhibit implicit personalities in their generation, but reliably controlling or aligning these traits to meet specific needs remains an open challenge. The need for effective mechanisms for behavioural manipulation of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-09 Pranav Bhandari , Nicolas Fay , Sanjeevan Selvaganapathy , Amitava Datta , Usman Naseem , Mehwish Nasim

Understanding and controlling the behavior of large language models (LLMs) is an increasingly important topic in multilingual NLP. Beyond prompting or fine-tuning, , i.e.,~manipulating internal representations during inference, has emerged…

Controlling undesirable Large Language Model (LLM) behaviors, such as the generation of unsafe content or failing to adhere to safety guidelines, often relies on costly fine-tuning. Activation steering provides an alternative for…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Amr Hegazy , Mostafa Elhoushi , Amr Alanwar

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly exhibit behaviors suggesting awareness of their evaluation context, often adapting their reasoning strategies in benchmark settings. Prior work has shown that such evaluation awareness can distort…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Yanshi Li , Xueru Bai , Shuman Liu , Haibo Zhang , Anxiang Zeng

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance across many generation tasks. Nevertheless, effectively aligning them with desired behaviors remains a significant challenge. Activation steering is an effective and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Zifeng Cheng , Jinwei Gan , Zhiwei Jiang , Cong Wang , Yafeng Yin , Xiang Luo , Yuchen Fu , Qing Gu

The rise of large language models (LLMs) has prompted increasing interest in their use as in-context learning agents. At the core of agentic behavior is the capacity for exploration, or the ability to actively gather information about the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-14 Nate Rahn , Pierluca D'Oro , Marc G. Bellemare

Despite the significant advancements in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), their tendency to generate hallucinations undermines reliability and restricts broader practical deployment. Among the hallucination mitigation methods, feature…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Tiantian Dang , Chao Bi , Shufan Shen , Jinzhe Liu , Qingming Huang , Shuhui Wang

Multilingual Large Language Models (LLMs) often exhibit hallucinations such as unintended code-switching, reducing reliability in downstream tasks. We propose latent-space language steering, a lightweight inference-time method that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Andrey Goncharov , Nikolai Kondusov , Alexey Zaytsev