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Adapting large pre-trained language models to downstream tasks often entails fine-tuning millions of parameters or deploying costly dense weight updates, which hinders their use in resource-constrained environments. Low-rank Adaptation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Longteng Zhang , Sen Wu , Shuai Hou , Zhengyu Qing , Zhuo Zheng , Danning Ke , Qihong Lin , Qiang Wang , Shaohuai Shi , Xiaowen Chu

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

Large Language Models have found success in a variety of applications. However, their safety remains a concern due to the existence of various jailbreaking methods. Despite significant efforts, alignment and safety fine-tuning only provide…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-16 Darpan Aswal , Céline Hudelot

Achieving robust safety alignment in large language models (LLMs) while preserving their utility remains a fundamental challenge. Existing approaches often struggle to balance comprehensive safety with fine-grained controllability at the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-25 Huizhen Shu , Xuying Li , Zhuo Li

Despite Large Language Models' remarkable capabilities, understanding their internal representations remains challenging. Mechanistic interpretability tools such as sparse autoencoders (SAEs) were developed to extract interpretable features…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-06 Xiangchen Song , Jiaqi Sun , Zijian Li , Yujia Zheng , Kun Zhang

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) provide potentials for uncovering structured, human-interpretable representations in Large Language Models (LLMs), making them a crucial tool for transparent and controllable AI systems. We systematically analyze…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Jack Gallifant , Shan Chen , Kuleen Sasse , Hugo Aerts , Thomas Hartvigsen , Danielle S. Bitterman

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved unprecedented breakthroughs in various natural language processing domains. However, the enigmatic ``black-box'' nature of LLMs remains a significant challenge for interpretability, hampering…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-12-27 Zhen Tan , Tianlong Chen , Zhenyu Zhang , Huan Liu

Recent advancements in large reasoning models (LRMs) have significantly enhanced language models' capabilities in complex problem-solving by emulating human-like deliberative thinking. However, these models often exhibit overthinking (i.e.,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-06-19 Weixiang Zhao , Jiahe Guo , Yang Deng , Xingyu Sui , Yulin Hu , Yanyan Zhao , Wanxiang Che , Bing Qin , Tat-Seng Chua , Ting Liu

Large Language Model (LLM) deployment requires guiding the LLM to recognize and not answer unsafe prompts while complying with safe prompts. Previous methods for achieving this require adjusting model weights along with other expensive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Samaksh Bhargav , Zining Zhu

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) demonstrate exceptional performance on tasks requiring complex linguistic abilities, such as reference disambiguation and metaphor recognition/generation. Although LLMs possess impressive capabilities, their…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-16 Yi Jing , Zijun Yao , Hongzhu Guo , Lingxu Ran , Xiaozhi Wang , Lei Hou , Juanzi Li

Safety alignment is indispensable for Large Language Models (LLMs) to defend threats from malicious instructions. However, recent researches reveal safety-aligned LLMs prone to reject benign queries due to the exaggerated safety issue,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-12-18 Zouying Cao , Yifei Yang , Hai Zhao

Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly employ alignment techniques to prevent harmful outputs. Despite these safeguards, attackers can circumvent them by crafting adversarial prompts. Predominant token-level optimization methods…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Jiawei Lian , Jianhong Pan , Lefan Wang , Yi Wang , Tairan Huang , Shaohui Mei , Lap-Pui Chau

Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful tools, but their inherent safety risks - ranging from harmful content generation to broader societal harms - pose significant challenges. These risks can be amplified by the recent…

Semantic role labeling (SRL) is a crucial task of natural language processing (NLP). Although generative decoder-based large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success across various NLP tasks, they still lag behind…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-09 Xinxin Li , Huiyao Chen , Chengjun Liu , Jing Li , Meishan Zhang , Jun Yu , Min Zhang

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

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a promising approach for general-purpose robot manipulation. However, their generalization is inconsistent: while these models can perform impressively in some settings, fine-tuned…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Aiden Swann , Lachlain McGranahan , Hugo Buurmeijer , Monroe Kennedy , Mac Schwager

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit significant safety disparities across languages, with low-resource languages (LRLs) often bypassing safety guardrails established for high-resource languages (HRLs) like English. Existing solutions, such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-27 Jiaming Liang , Zhaoxin Wang , Handing Wang

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a popular tool for interpreting the hidden states of large language models (LLMs). By learning to reconstruct activations from a sparse bottleneck layer, SAEs discover interpretable features from…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-09-19 Matthew Lyle Olson , Musashi Hinck , Neale Ratzlaff , Changbai Li , Phillip Howard , Vasudev Lal , Shao-Yen Tseng

Large Language Models (LLMs) encode factual knowledge within hidden parametric spaces that are difficult to inspect or control. While Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) can decompose hidden activations into more fine-grained, interpretable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Minglai Yang , Xinyu Guo , Zhengliang Shi , Jinhe Bi , Steven Bethard , Mihai Surdeanu , Liangming Pan