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The reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) are becoming a central focus of study in NLP. In this paper, we consider the case of syllogistic reasoning, an area of deductive reasoning studied extensively in logic and cognitive…

Finetuning on narrow domains has become an essential tool to adapt Large Language Models (LLMs) to specific tasks and to create models with known unusual properties that are useful for research. We show that narrow finetuning creates strong…

Reasoning-enhanced large language models (RLLMs), whether explicitly trained for reasoning or prompted via chain-of-thought (CoT), have achieved state-of-the-art performance on many complex reasoning tasks. However, we uncover a surprising…

Despite the success of Instruction Tuning (IT) in training large language models (LLMs), such models often leverage spurious or biased features learnt from their training data and can become misaligned, leading to undesired behaviours.…

The prevailing approach to distilling reasoning from Large Language Models (LLMs)-behavioral cloning from textual rationales-is fundamentally limited. It teaches Small Language Models (SLMs) to mimic surface-level patterns rather than the…

Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly show reasoning rationales alongside their answers, turning "reasoning" into a user-interface element. While step-by-step rationales are typically associated with model performance, how they…

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…

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…

We propose cognitive prompting as a novel approach to guide problem-solving in large language models (LLMs) through structured, human-like cognitive operations, such as goal clarification, decomposition, filtering, abstraction, and pattern…

Alignment in LLMs is more brittle than commonly assumed: misalignment can be triggered by adversarial prompts, benign fine-tuning, emergent misalignment, and goal misgeneralization. Recent evidence suggests that some misalignment behaviors…

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…

The internalization of chain-of-thought processes into hidden states has emerged as a highly efficient paradigm for scaling test-time compute. However, existing activation steering methods rely on static control vectors that fail to adapt…

Despite impressive breadth, LLMs still rely on explicit reasoning instructions or static, one-fits-all steering methods, leaving a gap for adaptive, instruction-free reasoning amplification. We present Prototype-Based Dynamic Steering…

As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being employed in real-world applications in critical domains such as healthcare, it is important to ensure that the Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning generated by these models faithfully…

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…

Large language models (LLMs) often exhibit undesirable behaviours, such as generating untruthful or biased content. Editing their internal representations has been shown to be effective in mitigating such behaviours on top of the existing…

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate the ability to solve reasoning and mathematical problems using the Chain-of-Thought (CoT) technique. Expanding CoT length, as seen in models such as DeepSeek-R1, significantly enhances this reasoning…

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…

Large Language Models (LLMs) trained for average correctness often exhibit mode collapse, producing narrow decision behaviors on tasks where multiple responses may be reasonable. This limitation is particularly problematic in ordinal…

Steering vectors are a promising approach to aligning language model behavior at inference time. In this paper, we propose a framework to assess the limitations of steering vectors as alignment mechanisms. Using a framework of transformer…