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Alignment training has tradeoffs: it helps language models (LMs) gain in reasoning and instruction following but might lose out on skills such as creativity and calibration, where unaligned base models are better at. We aim to make the best…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Shangbin Feng , Wenhao Yu , Yike Wang , Hongming Zhang , Yulia Tsvetkov , Dong Yu

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

Adapting models to a language that was only partially present in the pre-training data requires fine-tuning, which is expensive in terms of both data and computational resources. As an alternative to fine-tuning, we explore the potential of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-28 Daniel Scalena , Elisabetta Fersini , Malvina Nissim

Large language models are increasingly used to represent human opinions, values, or beliefs, and their steerability towards these ideals is an active area of research. Existing work focuses predominantly on aligning marginal response…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-22 Tristan Williams , Franziska Weeber , Sebastian Padó , Alan Akbik

Though large language models (LLMs) have enabled great success across a wide variety of tasks, they still appear to fall short of one of the loftier goals of artificial intelligence research: creating an artificial system that can adapt its…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-04 Michael A. Lepori , Tal Linzen , Ann Yuan , Katja Filippova

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized many areas (e.g. natural language processing, software engineering, etc.) by achieving state-of-the-art performance on extensive downstream tasks. Aiming to achieve robust and general…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-01-18 Zhiming Li , Yushi Cao , Xiufeng Xu , Junzhe Jiang , Xu Liu , Yon Shin Teo , Shang-wei Lin , Yang Liu

While large language models (LLMs) are trained to align with human values, their generations may still violate safety constraints. A growing line of work addresses this problem by modifying the model's sampling policy at decoding time using…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Bat-Sheva Einbinder , Hen Davidov , Yee Whye Teh , Yarin Gal , Yaniv Romano

Inference-time LLM alignment methods, particularly activation steering, offer an alternative to fine-tuning by directly modifying activations during generation. Existing methods, however, often rely on non-anticipative interventions that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-22 Julian Skifstad , Xinyue Annie Yang , Glen Chou

Recent breakthroughs in large language models (LLM) have stirred up global attention, and the research has been accelerating non-stop since then. Philosophers and psychologists have also been researching the structure of language for…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-17 Joseph Chen

Large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced dialogue systems and role-playing agents through their ability to generate human-like text. While prior studies have shown that LLMs can exhibit distinct and consistent personalities,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-18 Shu Yang , Shenzhe Zhu , Liang Liu , Lijie Hu , Mengdi Li , Di Wang

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed with hierarchical instruction schemes, where certain instructions (e.g., system-level directives) are expected to take precedence over others (e.g., user messages). Yet, we lack a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Yilin Geng , Haonan Li , Honglin Mu , Xudong Han , Timothy Baldwin , Omri Abend , Eduard Hovy , Lea Frermann

Recent advances in Language Models (LMs) have failed to mask their shortcomings particularly in the domain of reasoning. This limitation impacts several tasks, most notably those involving ontology engineering. As part of a PhD research, we…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-15 Hanna Abi Akl

Large language models (LLMs) often struggle with complex mathematical tasks, prone to "hallucinating" incorrect answers due to their reliance on statistical patterns. This limitation is further amplified in average Small LangSLMs with…

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in processing both visual and textual information. However, the critical challenge of alignment between visual and textual representations is not fully…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-09-24 Dong Shu , Haiyan Zhao , Jingyu Hu , Weiru Liu , Ali Payani , Lu Cheng , Mengnan Du

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

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) achieve strong performance through extended inference-time deliberation, yet how their reasoning failures arise remains poorly understood. By analyzing model-generated reasoning trajectories, we find that errors…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Wei Zhu , Jian Zhang , Lixing Yu , Kun Yue , Zhiwen Tang

Large-language models are capable of completing a variety of tasks, but remain unpredictable and intractable. Representation engineering seeks to resolve this problem through a new approach utilizing samples of contrasting inputs to detect…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-02-26 Lukasz Bartoszcze , Sarthak Munshi , Bryan Sukidi , Jennifer Yen , Zejia Yang , David Williams-King , Linh Le , Kosi Asuzu , Carsten Maple

Activation steering methods enable inference-time control of large language model (LLM) behavior without retraining, but current approaches face a fundamental trade-off: sample-efficient methods suboptimally capture steering signals from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-09 Kartik Sharma , Rakshit S. Trivedi

We propose a novel framework for comprehending the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) through the perspective of meta-learning. By conceptualizing reasoning trajectories as pseudo-gradient descent updates to the LLM's…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Junnan Liu , Hongwei Liu , Linchen Xiao , Shudong Liu , Taolin Zhang , Zihan Ma , Songyang Zhang , Kai Chen