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The ability to follow instructions is crucial for numerous real-world applications of language models. In pursuit of deeper insights and more powerful capabilities, we derive instruction-specific vector representations from language models…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-15 Alessandro Stolfo , Vidhisha Balachandran , Safoora Yousefi , Eric Horvitz , Besmira Nushi

Despite the success of Instruction Tuning (IT) in training large language models (LLMs), such models often leverage spurious or biased features learnt from their training data and can become misaligned, leading to undesired behaviours.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Tom A. Lamb , Adam Davies , Alasdair Paren , Philip H. S. Torr , Francesco Pinto

Recent work on activation and latent steering has demonstrated that modifying internal representations can effectively guide large language models (LLMs) toward improved reasoning and efficiency without additional training. However, most…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-07 Tuc Nguyen , Thai Le

Recent progress in large language models (LLMs) has focused on test-time scaling to improve reasoning via increased inference computation, but often at the cost of efficiency. We revisit test-time behavior and uncover a simple yet…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Zhen Yang , Mingyang Zhang , Feng Chen , Ganggui Ding , Liang Hou , Xin Tao , Ying-Cong Chen

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-26 Christopher M. Ackerman

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

Activation steering methods control large language model (LLM) behavior by modifying internal activations at inference time. However, most existing activation steering methods rely on a fixed steering strength, leading to either…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-16 Arthur Vogels , Benjamin Wong , Yann Choho , Annabelle Blangero , Milan Bhan

Large language models (LLMs) often exhibit undesirable behaviors, such as safety violations and hallucinations. Although inference-time steering offers a cost-effective way to adjust model behavior without updating its parameters, existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-20 Zixuan Weng , Jinghuai Zhang , Kunlin Cai , Ying Li , Peiran Wang , Yuan Tian

As large language models (LLMs) become more integrated into societal systems, the risk of them perpetuating and amplifying harmful biases becomes a critical safety concern. Traditional methods for mitigating bias often rely on data…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-08-13 Shivam Dubey

Mechanistic Interpretability (MI) has emerged as a vital approach to demystify the opaque decision-making of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, existing reviews primarily treat MI as an observational science, summarizing analytical…

Changing the behavior of large language models (LLMs) can be as straightforward as editing the Transformer's residual streams using appropriately constructed "steering vectors." These modifications to internal neural activations, a form of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Jian-Qiao Zhu , Haijiang Yan , Thomas L. Griffiths

It is a critical challenge to efficiently unlock the powerful reasoning potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) for specific tasks or new distributions. Existing test-time adaptation methods often require tuning model parameters, which is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-05 Xinyue Kang , Diwei Shi , Li Chen

We present an approach called Dialogue Action Tokens (DAT) that adapts language model agents to plan goal-directed dialogues. The core idea is to treat each utterance as an action, thereby converting dialogues into games where existing…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-19 Kenneth Li , Yiming Wang , Fernanda Viégas , Martin Wattenberg

The rapid evolution of large language models (LLMs) has intensified the demand for effective personalization techniques that can adapt model behavior to individual user preferences. Despite the non-parametric methods utilizing the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-03 Kounianhua Du , Jianxing Liu , Kangning Zhang , Wenxiang Jiao , Yuan Lu , Jiarui Jin , Weiwen Liu , Yong Yu , Weinan Zhang

Large Language Models (LLMs) trained for average correctness often exhibit mode collapse, producing narrow decision behaviors on tasks where multiple responses may be reasonable. This limitation is particularly problematic in ordinal…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Eric Yang , Jong Ha Lee , Jonathan Amar , Elissa Ye , Yugang Jia

Model steering represents a powerful technique that dynamically aligns large language models (LLMs) with human preferences during inference. However, conventional model-steering methods rely heavily on externally annotated data, not only…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-15 Rongyi Zhu , Yuhui Wang , Tanqiu Jiang , Jiacheng Liang , Ting Wang

Controllable generation requires language models to realize output characteristics such as reading level, politeness, and toxicity. Existing steering methods are often indirect, require access to internal activations, or depend on auxiliary…

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

Precise control over language model generation is vital for ensuring both safety and reliability. Although prompt engineering and steering are commonly used to intervene in model behaviors, the vast number of parameters in models often…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Mengru Wang , Ziwen Xu , Shengyu Mao , Shumin Deng , Zhaopeng Tu , Huajun Chen , Ningyu Zhang

Precise attribute intensity control--generating Large Language Model (LLM) outputs with specific, user-defined attribute intensities--is crucial for AI systems adaptable to diverse user expectations. Current LLM alignment methods, however,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-19 Rongzhi Zhang , Liqin Ye , Yuzhao Heng , Xiang Chen , Tong Yu , Lingkai Kong , Sudheer Chava , Chao Zhang

Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive abilities in leveraging pretrained knowledge through prompting, but they often struggle with unseen tasks, particularly in data-scarce scenarios. While cross-task in-context learning offers…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-18 Xinyu Tang , Zhihao Lv , Xiaoxue Cheng , Junyi Li , Wayne Xin Zhao , Zujie Wen , Zhiqiang Zhang , Jun Zhou