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Recent work has demonstrated the potential of contrastive steering for jailbreaking Large Language Models (LLMs). However, existing methods rely on limited and inherently biased contrastive prompts and require laborious manual tuning of…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Junxi Chen , Junhao Dong , Xiaohua Xie

A fundamental challenge in autonomous driving is the integration of high-level, semantic reasoning for long-tail events with low-level, reactive control for robust driving. While large vision-language models (VLMs) trained on web-scale data…

In this paper, we present a challenging code reasoning task: vulnerability detection. Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promising results in natural-language and math reasoning, but state-of-the-art (SOTA) models reported only 54.5%…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-01-09 Benjamin Steenhoek , Md Mahbubur Rahman , Monoshi Kumar Roy , Mirza Sanjida Alam , Hengbo Tong , Swarna Das , Earl T. Barr , Wei Le

Language models (LMs) have been shown to behave unexpectedly post-deployment. For example, new jailbreaks continually arise, allowing model misuse, despite extensive red-teaming and adversarial training from developers. Given most model…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-25 Asa Cooper Stickland , Alexander Lyzhov , Jacob Pfau , Salsabila Mahdi , Samuel R. Bowman

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world applications where users engage in extended, mixed-topic conversations that depend on prior context. Yet, their reliability under realistic multi-turn interactions remains…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Jiyoon Myung

This paper investigates the mathematical reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) using 50 newly constructed high-school-level word problems. Unlike prior studies that focus solely on answer correctness, we rigorously analyze…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-02-24 Johan Boye , Birger Moell

Linear activation steering is a powerful approach for eliciting the capabilities of large language models and specializing their behavior using limited labeled data. While effective, existing methods often apply a fixed steering strength to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Brandon Hsu , Daniel Beaglehole , Adityanarayanan Radhakrishnan , Mikhail Belkin

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

Large language models (LLMs) can sometimes detect when they are being evaluated and adjust their behavior to appear more aligned, compromising the reliability of safety evaluations. In this paper, we show that adding a steering vector to an…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Tim Tian Hua , Andrew Qin , Samuel Marks , Neel Nanda

With the rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs), their deployment in real-world applications has become increasingly widespread. LLMs are expected to deliver robust performance across diverse tasks, user preferences, and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-21 Wei Xia , Zhi-Hong Deng

Reflection, the ability of large language models (LLMs) to evaluate and revise their own reasoning, has been widely used to improve performance on complex reasoning tasks. Yet, most prior works emphasizes designing reflective prompting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-12 Fu-Chieh Chang , Yu-Ting Lee , Pei-Yuan Wu

Activation steering presupposes that task-relevant behaviors correspond to linear directions in activation space -- directions that should both steer the model and be readable along the unembedding. Function vectors (FVs), extracted as mean…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Mohammed Suhail B Nadaf

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in socially sensitive domains, yet their unpredictable behaviors, ranging from misaligned intent to inconsistent personality, pose significant risks. We introduce SteerEval, a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Ziwen Xu , Kewei Xu , Haoming Xu , Haiwen Hong , Longtao Huang , Hui Xue , Ningyu Zhang , Yongliang Shen , Guozhou Zheng , Huajun Chen , Shumin Deng

Advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have increased the performance of different natural language understanding as well as generation tasks. Although LLMs have breached the state-of-the-art performance in various tasks, they often…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Charaka Vinayak Kumar , Ashok Urlana , Gopichand Kanumolu , Bala Mallikarjunarao Garlapati , Pruthwik Mishra

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) exhibit outstanding performance on vision-language tasks but struggle with hallucination problems. Through in-depth analysis of LVLM activation patterns, we reveal two key findings: 1) truthfulness and…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-02-26 Jianghao Yin , Qin Chen , Kedi Chen , Jie Zhou , Xingjiao Wu , Liang He

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been shown to achieve breakthrough performance on complex logical reasoning tasks. Nevertheless, most existing research focuses on employing formal language to guide LLMs to derive reliable reasoning paths,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-23 Jin Jiang , Jianing Wang , Yuchen Yan , Yang Liu , Jianhua Zhu , Mengdi Zhang , Xunliang Cai , Liangcai Gao

Large language models (LLMs) tend to verbalize confidence scores that are largely detached from their actual accuracy, yet the geometric relationship governing this behavior remain poorly understood. In this work, we present a mechanistic…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Miranda Muqing Miao , Lyle Ungar

Large language models can be steered at inference time through prompting or activation interventions, but activation steering methods often underperform compared to prompt-based approaches. We propose a framework that formulates prompt…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-06 Geert Heyman , Frederik Vandeputte

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

Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely used by software engineers for programming tasks. However, research shows that LLMs often lack a deep understanding of program semantics. Even minor changes to syntax, such as renaming variables, can…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-06 Francesca Lucchetti , Arjun Guha