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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…

Multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable success on complex multi-modal tasks. However, it remains insufficiently explored whether they exhibit $\textbf{modality preference}$, a tendency to favor one modality over…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-05 Yu Zhang , Jinlong Ma , Yongshuai Hou , Xuefeng Bai , Kehai Chen , Yang Xiang , Jun Yu , Min Zhang

Protein Language Models (PLMs), pre-trained on extensive evolutionary data from natural proteins, have emerged as indispensable tools for protein design. While powerful, PLMs often struggle to produce proteins with precisely specified…

Biomolecules · Quantitative Biology 2025-09-15 Long-Kai Huang , Rongyi Zhu , Bing He , Jianhua Yao

Activation steering is a practical post-training model alignment technique to enhance the utility of Large Language Models (LLMs). Prior to deploying a model as a service, developers can steer a pre-trained model toward specific behavioral…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Chen Xiong , Zhiyuan He , Pin-Yu Chen , Ching-Yun Ko , Tsung-Yi Ho

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human objectives is crucial for real-world applications. However, fine-tuning LLMs for alignment often suffers from unstable training and requires substantial computing resources. Test-time…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-11-05 Lingkai Kong , Haorui Wang , Wenhao Mu , Yuanqi Du , Yuchen Zhuang , Yifei Zhou , Yue Song , Rongzhi Zhang , Kai Wang , Chao Zhang

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive performance in natural language tasks, but their outputs can exhibit undesirable attributes or biases. Existing methods for steering LLMs toward desired attributes often assume unbiased…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-05 Zhixuan Chu , Yan Wang , Longfei Li , Zhibo Wang , Zhan Qin , Kui Ren

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have resulted in increasingly anthropomorphic language concerning the ability of LLMs to reason. Whether reasoning in LLMs should be understood to be inherently different is, however,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-28 Bertram Højer , Oliver Jarvis , Stefan Heinrich

This work introduces SteerVLM, a lightweight steering module designed to guide Vision-Language Models (VLMs) towards outputs that better adhere to desired instructions. Our approach learns from the latent embeddings of paired prompts…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-10-31 Anushka Sivakumar , Andrew Zhang , Zaber Hakim , Chris Thomas

Large language models (LLMs) encode a diverse range of linguistic features within their latent representations, which can be harnessed to steer their output toward specific target characteristics. In this paper, we modify the internal…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-27 Sumanta Bhattacharyya , Pedram Rooshenas

Large language models (LLMs) are known to perpetuate stereotypes and exhibit biases. Various strategies have been proposed to mitigate these biases, but most work studies biases as a black-box problem without considering how concepts are…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-19 Hannah Cyberey , Yangfeng Ji , David Evans

Even after fine-tuning and reinforcement learning, large language models (LLMs) can be difficult, if not impossible, to control reliably with prompts alone. We propose a new inference-time approach to enforcing syntactic and semantic…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-11-28 Alexander K. Lew , Tan Zhi-Xuan , Gabriel Grand , Vikash K. Mansinghka

As large language models (LLMs) improve in their capacity to serve as personal AI assistants, their ability to output uniquely tailored, personalized responses that align with the soft preferences of their users is essential for enhancing…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2025-05-15 Jessica Y. Bo , Tianyu Xu , Ishan Chatterjee , Katrina Passarella-Ward , Achin Kulshrestha , D Shin

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

Steering methods influence Large Language Model behavior by identifying semantic directions in hidden representations, but are typically realized through inference-time activation interventions that apply a fixed, global modification to the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Chung-En Sun , Ge Yan , Zimo Wang , Tsui-Wei Weng

Representation Misdirection for Unlearning (RMU), which steers model representation in the intermediate layer to a target random representation, is an effective method for large language model (LLM) unlearning. Despite its high performance,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-07 Dang Huu-Tien , Trung-Tin Pham , Hoang Thanh-Tung , Naoya Inoue

Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve remarkable performance through pretraining on extensive data. This enables efficient adaptation to diverse downstream tasks. However, the lack of interpretability in their underlying mechanisms limits…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Xintong Wang , Jingheng Pan , Liang Ding , Longyue Wang , Longqin Jiang , Xingshan Li , Chris Biemann

Large language models (LLMs) have transformed the way we access information. These models are often tuned to refuse to comply with requests that are considered harmful and to produce responses that better align with the preferences of those…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-12 Hannah Cyberey , David Evans

The influence of personas on Large Language Models (LLMs) has been widely studied, yet their direct impact on performance remains uncertain. This work explores a novel approach to guiding LLM behaviour through role vectors, an alternative…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-18 Daniele Potertì , Andrea Seveso , Fabio Mercorio

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable capabilities across various tasks, yet guiding them to follow desired behaviours during inference remains a significant challenge. Activation steering offers a promising method to control the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Weixuan Wang , Minghao Wu , Barry Haddow , Alexandra Birch

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values has become increasingly important as their influence on human behavior and decision-making expands. However, existing steering-based alignment methods suffer from limited…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Yonghui Yang , Junwei Li , Jilong Liu , Yicheng He , Fengbin Zhu , Weibiao Huang , Le Wu , Richang Hong , Tat-Seng Chua