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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) offer significant promise as a knowledge source for task learning. Prompt engineering has been shown to be effective for eliciting knowledge from an LLM, but alone it is insufficient for acquiring relevant,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-02-21 James R. Kirk , Robert E. Wray , Peter Lindes , John E. Laird

Pre-trained vision-language models provide a robust foundation for efficient transfer learning across various downstream tasks. In the field of video action recognition, mainstream approaches often introduce additional modules to capture…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-03-19 Haoxing Chen , Zizheng Huang , Yan Hong , Yanshuo Wang , Zhongcai Lyu , Zhuoer Xu , Jun Lan , Zhangxuan Gu

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit impressive performance across diverse domains but often suffer from overconfidence, limiting their reliability in critical applications. We propose SteerConf, a novel framework that systematically steers…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Ziang Zhou , Tianyuan Jin , Jieming Shi , Qing Li

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are a promising path to realizing generalist embodied agents that can quickly adapt to new tasks, modalities, and environments. However, methods for interpreting and steering VLAs fall far short of…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Bear Häon , Kaylene Stocking , Ian Chuang , Claire Tomlin

Language models (LMs) are typically post-trained for desired capabilities and behaviors via weight-based or prompt-based steering, but the former is time-consuming and expensive, and the latter is not precisely controllable and often…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Sasha Cui , Zhongren Chen

We introduce Contrastive Activation Addition (CAA), an innovative method for steering language models by modifying their activations during forward passes. CAA computes "steering vectors" by averaging the difference in residual stream…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-08 Nina Panickssery , Nick Gabrieli , Julian Schulz , Meg Tong , Evan Hubinger , Alexander Matt Turner

It is a critical challenge to efficiently unlock the powerful reasoning potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) for specific tasks or new distributions. Existing test-time adaptation methods often require tuning model parameters, which is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-05 Xinyue Kang , Diwei Shi , Li Chen

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

Training data attribution (TDA) methods ask which training documents are responsible for a model behavior. However, models often learn broad concepts shared across many examples. Moreover, existing TDA methods are supervised -- they require…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-18 J Rosser

Large Language Models employing extended chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning often suffer from the overthinking phenomenon, generating excessive and redundant reasoning steps that increase computational costs while potentially degrading…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Aryasomayajula Ram Bharadwaj

Recent work has made a preliminary attempt to use large language models (LLMs) to solve the stance detection task, showing promising results. However, considering that stance detection usually requires detailed background knowledge, the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-29 Xiaolong Wang , Yile Wang , Sijie Cheng , Peng Li , Yang Liu

In this work, we examine how targeted perturbations in the activation space of Language Models (LMs) can encode complex reasoning patterns. We inject steering vectors, derived from LM activations, into LMs during inference time and study…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-24 Jason Zhang , Scott Viteri

Despite their remarkable success, large language models (LLMs) have shown limited ability on safety-critical code tasks such as vulnerability detection. Typically, static analysis (SA) tools, like CodeQL, CodeGuru Security, etc., are used…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-09-15 Ira Ceka , Feitong Qiao , Anik Dey , Aastha Valecha , Gail Kaiser , Baishakhi Ray

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…

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 safety evaluations of language models rely on benchmark-based assessments that may miss localized vulnerabilities. We present RepIt, a simple and data-efficient framework for isolating concept-specific representations in LM…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-22 Vincent Siu , Nathan W. Henry , Nicholas Crispino , Yang Liu , Dawn Song , Chenguang Wang

This paper investigates how large language models (LLMs) behave when faced with discrepancies between their parametric knowledge and conflicting information contained in a prompt. Building on prior question-answering (QA) research, we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-23 Jaesung Bae , Cameron Churchwell , Mitchell Hermon , Tsun-An Hsieh , Jocelyn Xu , Yekaterina Yegorova , Mark Hasegawa-Johnson , Heng Ji

Methods for controlling large language models (LLMs), including local weight fine-tuning, LoRA-based adaptation, and activation-based interventions, are often studied in isolation, obscuring their connections and making comparison…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Ziwen Xu , Chenyan Wu , Hengyu Sun , Haiwen Hong , Mengru Wang , Yunzhi Yao , Longtao Huang , Hui Xue , Shumin Deng , Zhixuan Chu , Huajun Chen , Ningyu Zhang

Recent adaptations of Large Language Models (LLMs) for time series forecasting often fail to effectively enhance information for raw series, leaving LLM reasoning capabilities underutilized. Existing prompting strategies rely on static…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-05 Junjie Fan , Hongye Zhao , Linduo Wei , Jiayu Rao , Guijia Li , Jiaxin Yuan , Wenqi Xu , Yong Qi