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Language Models (LMs) are prone to memorizing parts of their data during training and unintentionally emitting them at generation time, raising concerns about privacy leakage and disclosure of intellectual property. While previous research…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-12 Stefan Arnold

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable success in recent years, enabling a wide range of applications, including intelligent assistants that support users' daily life and work. A critical factor in building such assistants is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Xiaoyan Zhao , Ming Yan , Yilun Qiu , Haoting Ni , Yang Zhang , Fuli Feng , Hong Cheng , Tat-Seng Chua

Large language models (LLMs) excel at diverse tasks, but their deployment on resource-constrained devices remains challenging. Existing methods like quantization, pruning, and distillation can reduce memory footprint but often demand…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Siddharth Tandon

Large language models (LLMs) may memorize sensitive or copyrighted content, raising privacy and legal concerns. Due to the high cost of retraining from scratch, researchers attempt to employ machine unlearning to remove specific content…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-12 Xiaojian Yuan , Tianyu Pang , Chao Du , Kejiang Chen , Weiming Zhang , Min Lin

LLMs have been found to memorize training textual sequences and regurgitate verbatim said sequences during text generation time. This fact is known to be the cause of privacy and related (e.g., copyright) problems. Unlearning in LLMs then…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-07 George-Octavian Barbulescu , Peter Triantafillou

Large language models (LLMs) can be controlled at inference time through prompts (in-context learning) and internal activations (activation steering). Different accounts have been proposed to explain these methods, yet their common goal of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-13 Eric Bigelow , Daniel Wurgaft , YingQiao Wang , Noah Goodman , Tomer Ullman , Hidenori Tanaka , Ekdeep Singh Lubana

Questions of fair use of copyright-protected content to train Large Language Models (LLMs) are being actively debated. Document-level inference has been proposed as a new task: inferring from black-box access to the trained model whether a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-06 Matthieu Meeus , Igor Shilov , Manuel Faysse , Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye

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

Despite extensive efforts in safety alignment, large language models (LLMs) remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks. Activation steering offers a training-free defense method but relies on fixed steering coefficients, resulting in suboptimal…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Weixiang Zhao , Jiahe Guo , Yulin Hu , Yang Deng , An Zhang , Xingyu Sui , Xinyang Han , Yanyan Zhao , Bing Qin , Tat-Seng Chua , Ting Liu

Current large language models have dangerous capabilities, which are likely to become more problematic in the future. Activation steering techniques can be used to reduce risks from these capabilities. In this paper, we investigate the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-12 Teun van der Weij , Massimo Poesio , Nandi Schoots

This study investigates the mechanisms and factors influencing memorization in fine-tuned large language models (LLMs), with a focus on the medical domain due to its privacy-sensitive nature. We examine how different aspects of the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-06 Danil Savine

The performance of modern machine learning systems depends on access to large, high-quality datasets, often sourced from user-generated content or proprietary, domain-specific corpora. However, these rich datasets inherently contain…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-08-28 Zhan Shi , Yefeng Yuan , Yuhong Liu , Liang Cheng , Yi Fang

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) are known for their expensive and time-consuming training. Thus, oftentimes, LLMs are fine-tuned to address a specific task, given the pretrained weights of a pre-trained LLM considered a foundation model. In…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-05 Eshed Gal , Moshe Eliasof , Javier Turek , Uri Ascher , Eran Treister , Eldad Haber

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

As the deployment of pre-trained language models (PLMs) expands, pressing security concerns have arisen regarding the potential for malicious extraction of training data, posing a threat to data privacy. This study is the first to provide a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-26 Shotaro Ishihara

We introduce Mechanistic Error Reduction with Abstention (MERA), a principled framework for steering language models (LMs) to mitigate errors through selective, adaptive interventions. Unlike existing methods that rely on fixed, manually…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-16 Anna Hedström , Salim I. Amoukou , Tom Bewley , Saumitra Mishra , Manuela Veloso

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become increasingly central to recommendation scenarios due to their remarkable natural language understanding and generation capabilities. Although significant research has explored the use of LLMs for…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-05-16 Dario Di Palma , Felice Antonio Merra , Maurizio Sfilio , Vito Walter Anelli , Fedelucio Narducci , Tommaso Di Noia

Deploying LLMs in real-world applications requires controllable output that satisfies multiple desiderata at the same time. While existing work extensively addresses LLM steering for a single behavior, \textit{compositional steering} --…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Gorjan Radevski , Kiril Gashteovski , Giwon Hong , Carolin Lawrence , Goran Glavaš

Vision Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in integrating visual and textual information for understanding and reasoning, but remain highly vulnerable to adversarial attacks. While activation steering has…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Sihao Wu , Gaojie Jin , Wei Huang , Jianhong Wang , Xiaowei Huang