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Activation steering has emerged as a powerful tool to shape LLM behavior without the need for weight updates. While its inherent brittleness and unreliability are well-documented, its safety implications remain underexplored. In this work,…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-03-26 Yuxiao Li , Alina Fastowski , Efstratios Zaradoukas , Bardh Prenkaj , Gjergji Kasneci

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

Steering, or direct manipulation of internal activations to guide LLM responses toward specific semantic concepts, is emerging as a promising avenue for both understanding how semantic concepts are stored within LLMs and advancing LLM…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Parmida Davarmanesh , Ashia Wilson , Adityanarayanan Radhakrishnan

Large language models (LLMs) offer significant potential as tools to support an expanding range of decision-making tasks. Given their training on human (created) data, LLMs have been shown to inherit societal biases against protected…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-10-07 Jessica Echterhoff , Yao Liu , Abeer Alessa , Julian McAuley , Zexue He

Natural language processing (NLP) has seen remarkable advancements with the development of large language models (LLMs). Despite these advancements, LLMs often produce socially biased outputs. Recent studies have mainly addressed this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-13 Zhenjie Xu , Wenqing Chen , Yi Tang , Xuanying Li , Cheng Hu , Zhixuan Chu , Kui Ren , Zibin Zheng , Zhichao Lu

We explore the internal mechanisms of how bias emerges in large language models (LLMs) when provided with ambiguous comparative prompts: inputs that compare or enforce choosing between two or more entities without providing clear context…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-31 Rishabh Adiga , Besmira Nushi , Varun Chandrasekaran

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

Rapid advancements of large language models (LLMs) have enabled the processing, understanding, and generation of human-like text, with increasing integration into systems that touch our social sphere. Despite this success, these models can…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-16 Isabel O. Gallegos , Ryan A. Rossi , Joe Barrow , Md Mehrab Tanjim , Sungchul Kim , Franck Dernoncourt , Tong Yu , Ruiyi Zhang , Nesreen K. Ahmed

Large Language Models (LLMs) inherit societal biases from their training data, potentially leading to harmful or unfair outputs. While various techniques aim to mitigate these biases, their effects are often evaluated only along the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Shireen Chand , Faith Baca , Emilio Ferrara

Steering vectors are a promising approach to aligning language model behavior at inference time. In this paper, we propose a framework to assess the limitations of steering vectors as alignment mechanisms. Using a framework of transformer…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-05 Chebrolu Niranjan , Kokil Jaidka , Gerard Christopher Yeo

Steering vectors (SVs) have been proposed as an effective approach to adjust language model behaviour at inference time by intervening on intermediate model activations. They have shown promise in terms of improving both capabilities and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-06 Daniel Tan , David Chanin , Aengus Lynch , Dimitrios Kanoulas , Brooks Paige , Adria Garriga-Alonso , Robert Kirk

Large language models (LLMs) often encode cognitive behaviors unpredictably across prompts, layers, and contexts, making them difficult to diagnose and control. We present CBMAS, a diagnostic framework for continuous activation steering,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Ahmed H. Ismail , Anthony Kuang , Ayo Akinkugbe , Kevin Zhu , Sean O'Brien

Vision Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly being used in a broad range of applications, bringing their security and behavioral control to the forefront. While existing approaches for behavioral control or output redirection, like system…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-08-13 Mansi Phute , Ravikumar Balakrishnan

Large Language Models (LLMs) are trained on large corpora written by humans and demonstrate high performance on various tasks. However, as humans are susceptible to cognitive biases, which can result in irrational judgments, LLMs can also…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-03 Yasuaki Sumita , Koh Takeuchi , Hisashi Kashima

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as autonomous decision-makers in strategic settings, yet we have limited tools for understanding their high-level behavioral traits. We use activation steering methods in game-theoretic…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Johnathan Sun , Andrew Zhang

Mitigating explicit and implicit biases in Large Language Models (LLMs) has become a critical focus in the field of natural language processing. However, many current methodologies evaluate scenarios in isolation, without considering the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-04 Robert Morabito , Sangmitra Madhusudan , Tyler McDonald , Ali Emami

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have positioned them as powerful tools for clinical decision-making, with rapidly expanding applications in healthcare. However, concerns about bias remain a significant challenge in the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-10-23 Kenza Benkirane , Jackie Kay , Maria Perez-Ortiz

Inference-time intervention (ITI) has emerged as a promising method for steering large language model (LLM) behavior in a particular direction (e.g., improving helpfulness) by intervening on token representations without costly updates to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-10 Duy Nguyen , Archiki Prasad , Elias Stengel-Eskin , Mohit Bansal

The influence of personas on Large Language Models (LLMs) has been widely studied, yet their direct impact on performance remains uncertain. This work explores a novel approach to guiding LLM behaviour through role vectors, an alternative…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-18 Daniele Potertì , Andrea Seveso , Fabio Mercorio

Steerability, or the ability of large language models (LLMs) to adapt outputs to align with diverse community-specific norms, perspectives, and communication styles, is critical for real-world applications but remains under-evaluated. We…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-05 Kai Chen , Zihao He , Taiwei Shi , Kristina Lerman