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Analyzing large-scale text corpora is a core challenge in machine learning, crucial for tasks like identifying undesirable model behaviors or biases in training data. Current methods often rely on costly LLM-based techniques (e.g.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-12 Nick Jiang , Xiaoqing Sun , Lisa Dunlap , Lewis Smith , Neel Nanda

Activation-based steering can personalize large language models at inference time, but its effects in educational settings remain unclear. We study persona vectors for seven character traits in short-answer generation and automated scoring…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-09 Yongchao Wu , Aron Henriksson

Large Language Models (LLMs), with their abilities in knowledge acquisition and reasoning, can potentially enhance the various aspects of Self-adaptive Systems (SAS). Yet, the potential of LLMs in SAS remains largely unexplored and…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-01-17 Jialong Li , Mingyue Zhang , Nianyu Li , Danny Weyns , Zhi Jin , Kenji Tei

The remarkable success of Large Language Models (LLMs) relies heavily on their substantial scale, which poses significant challenges during model deployment in terms of latency and memory consumption. Recently, numerous studies have…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-19 Weiyu Huang , Yuezhou Hu , Guohao Jian , Jun Zhu , Jianfei Chen

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) model the activations of a neural network as linear combinations of sparsely occurring directions of variation (latents). The ability of SAEs to reconstruct activations follows scaling laws w.r.t. the number of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-05 Eric J. Michaud , Liv Gorton , Tom McGrath

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress, yet their internal mechanisms remain largely opaque, posing a significant challenge to their safe and reliable deployment. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Jiaojiao Han , Wujiang Xu , Mingyu Jin , Mengnan Du

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

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

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

Automated essay scoring (AES) is a challenging task in cross-prompt settings due to the diversity of scoring criteria. While previous studies have focused on the output of large language models (LLMs) to improve scoring accuracy, we believe…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Jinwei Chi , Ke Wang , Yu Chen , Xuanye Lin , Qiang Xu

Sparse computation offers a compelling solution for the inference of Large Language Models (LLMs) in low-resource scenarios by dynamically skipping the computation of inactive neurons. While traditional approaches focus on ReLU-based LLMs,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-07 Zhengyan Zhang , Yixin Song , Guanghui Yu , Xu Han , Yankai Lin , Chaojun Xiao , Chenyang Song , Zhiyuan Liu , Zeyu Mi , Maosong Sun

Activation steering has emerged as a promising alternative for controlling language-model behavior at inference time by modifying intermediate representations while keeping model parameters frozen. However, large-scale evaluations such as…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Zehao Jin , Ruixuan Deng , Junran Wang , Xinjie Shen , Chao Zhang

Standard statistical learning theory predicts that Large Language Models (LLMs) should overfit because their parameter counts vastly exceed the number of training tokens. Yet, in practice, they generalize robustly. We propose that the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Dibyanayan Bandyopadhyay , Asif Ekbal

In this study, we address the challenge of enabling large language models (LLMs) to consistently adhere to emotional support strategies in extended conversations. We focus on the steerability of the Llama-2 and Llama-3 suite of models,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-17 Navid Madani , Sougata Saha , Rohini Srihari

This research explores strategies for steering the output of large language models (LLMs) towards specific styles, such as sentiment, emotion, or writing style, by adding style vectors to the activations of hidden layers during text…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-05 Kai Konen , Sophie Jentzsch , Diaoulé Diallo , Peer Schütt , Oliver Bensch , Roxanne El Baff , Dominik Opitz , Tobias Hecking

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate increasing conversational fluency, yet instilling them with nuanced, human-like emotional expression remains a significant challenge. Current alignment techniques often address surface-level output…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Niranjan Chebrolu , Gerard Christopher Yeo , Kokil Jaidka

Tool-augmented LLM systems expose a control regime that learning theory has largely ignored: sequential decision-making with a massive discrete action universe (tools, APIs, documents) in which only a small, unknown subset is relevant for…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Angshul Majumdar

Recently, sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a promising technique for interpreting activations in foundation models by disentangling features into a sparse set of concepts. However, identifying the optimal level of sparsity for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Dongsheng Wang , Jinsen Zhang , Dawei Su , Hui Huang

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

Internal activations of diffusion models encode rich semantic information, but interpreting such representations remains challenging. While Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have shown promise in disentangling latent representations, existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-23 Zhenghao He , Guangzhi Xiong , Boyang Wang , Sanchit Sinha , Aidong Zhang