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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

Current evaluations of Large Language Model (LLM) steering techniques focus on task-specific performance, overlooking how well steered representations align with human cognition. Using a well-established triadic similarity judgment task, we…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Zach Studdiford , Timothy T. Rogers , Siddharth Suresh , Kushin Mukherjee

Latent space steering methods provide a practical approach to controlling large language models by applying steering vectors to intermediate activations, guiding outputs toward desired behaviors while avoiding retraining. Despite their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Shawn Im , Sharon Li

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly serve as automated evaluators, yet they suffer from "self-preference bias": a tendency to favor their own outputs over those of other models. This bias undermines fairness and reliability in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-05 Dani Roytburg , Matthew Bozoukov , Matthew Nguyen , Jou Barzdukas , Simon Fu , Narmeen Oozeer

While a lot of recent research focuses on enhancing the textual reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) by optimizing the multi-agent framework or reasoning chains, several benchmark tasks can be solved with 100\% success…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Yongchao Chen , Harsh Jhamtani , Srinagesh Sharma , Chuchu Fan , Chi Wang

Despite advances in large language models (LLMs) on reasoning and instruction-following tasks, it is unclear whether they can reliably produce outputs aligned with a variety of user goals, a concept called steerability. Two gaps in current…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Trenton Chang , Tobias Schnabel , Adith Swaminathan , Jenna Wiens

Large Language Models (LLMs), despite advances in instruction tuning, often fail to follow complex user instructions. Activation steering techniques aim to mitigate this by manipulating model internals, but have a potential risk of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Minjae Kang , Jaehyung Kim

A key objective of interpretability research on large language models (LLMs) is to develop methods for robustly steering models toward desired behaviors. To this end, two distinct approaches to interpretability -- ``bottom-up" and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-12 Madeline Brumley , Joe Kwon , David Krueger , Dmitrii Krasheninnikov , Usman Anwar

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

Feature steering has emerged as a promising approach for controlling LLM behavior through direct manipulation of internal representations, offering advantages over prompt engineering. However, its practical effectiveness in real-world…

Steering vectors offer a training-free mechanism for controlling reasoning behaviors in large language models, but constructing effective vectors requires identifying genuine behavioral signals in the model's hidden states. For behaviors…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-03 Haomin Zhuang , Hojun Yoo , Xiaonan Luo , Kehan Guo , Xiangliang Zhang

Despite significant progress in alignment, large language models (LLMs) remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks that elicit harmful behaviors. Activation steering techniques offer a promising inference-time intervention approach, but…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-28 Quy-Anh Dang , Chris Ngo

Large language models (LLMs) are able to generate grammatically well-formed text, but how do they encode their syntactic knowledge internally? While prior work has focused largely on binary grammatical contrasts, in this work, we study the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-16 Alina Klerings , Jannik Brinkmann , Daniel Ruffinelli , Simone Ponzetto

Steering methods have emerged as effective and targeted tools for guiding large language models' (LLMs) behavior without modifying their parameters. Multimodal large language models (MLLMs), however, do not currently enjoy the same suite of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-21 Woody Haosheng Gan , Deqing Fu , Julian Asilis , Ollie Liu , Dani Yogatama , Vatsal Sharan , Robin Jia , Willie Neiswanger

Model steering, which involves intervening on hidden representations at inference time, has emerged as a lightweight alternative to finetuning for precisely controlling large language models. While steering efficacy has been widely studied,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-09 Navita Goyal , Hal Daumé

Accurately gauging the confidence level of Large Language Models' (LLMs) predictions is pivotal for their reliable application. However, LLMs are often uncalibrated inherently and elude conventional calibration techniques due to their…

Understanding and controlling the behavior of large language models (LLMs) is an increasingly important topic in multilingual NLP. Beyond prompting or fine-tuning, , i.e.,~manipulating internal representations during inference, has emerged…

Steering vectors (SVs) offer a lightweight way to control large language models (LLMs) at inference time by shifting hidden activations, providing a practical middle ground between prompting and fine-tuning. Yet SVs can be unreliable in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Jiaqian Li , Yanshu Li , Kuan-Hao Huang

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

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit distinct and consistent personalities that greatly impact trust and engagement. While this means that personality frameworks would be highly valuable tools to characterize and control LLMs' behavior,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-19 Michel Frising , Daniel Balcells