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Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as autonomous decision-makers in strategic settings, yet we have limited tools for understanding their high-level behavioral traits. We use activation steering methods in game-theoretic…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Johnathan Sun , Andrew Zhang

We introduce Refusal Steering, an inference-time method to exercise fine-grained control over Large Language Models refusal behaviour on politically sensitive topics without retraining. We replace fragile pattern-based refusal detection…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-25 Iker García-Ferrero , David Montero , Roman Orus

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

Steering methods have emerged as effective and targeted tools for guiding large language models' (LLMs) behavior without modifying their parameters. Multimodal large language models (MLLMs), however, do not currently enjoy the same suite of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-21 Woody Haosheng Gan , Deqing Fu , Julian Asilis , Ollie Liu , Dani Yogatama , Vatsal Sharan , Robin Jia , Willie Neiswanger

This work examines whether activating latent subspaces in language models (LLMs) can steer scientific code generation toward a specific programming language. Five causal LLMs were first evaluated on scientific coding prompts to quantify…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-06-24 Vansh Sharma , Venkat Raman

In this paper, we introduce EasyEdit2, a framework designed to enable plug-and-play adjustability for controlling Large Language Model (LLM) behaviors. EasyEdit2 supports a wide range of test-time interventions, including safety, sentiment,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-16 Ziwen Xu , Shuxun Wang , Kewei Xu , Haoming Xu , Mengru Wang , Xinle Deng , Yunzhi Yao , Guozhou Zheng , Huajun Chen , Ningyu Zhang

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-03 Haomin Zhuang , Hojun Yoo , Xiaonan Luo , Kehan Guo , Xiangliang Zhang

Code LLMs often default to particular programming languages and libraries under neutral prompts. We investigate whether these preferences are encoded as approximately linear directions in activation space that can be manipulated at…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-30 Md Mahbubur Rahman , Arjun Guha , Harshitha Menon

The memorization of training data by Large Language Models (LLMs) poses significant risks, including privacy leaks and the regurgitation of copyrighted content. Activation steering, a technique that directly intervenes in model activations,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-11 Manan Suri , Nishit Anand , Amisha Bhaskar

Large Language Models (LLMs) offer strong generative capabilities, but many applications require explicit and \textit{fine-grained} control over specific textual concepts, such as humor, persuasiveness, or formality. Prior approaches in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Arya Labroo , Ivaxi Sheth , Vyas Raina , Amaani Ahmed , Mario Fritz

Understanding how large audio models represent music, and using that understanding to steer generation, is both challenging and underexplored. Inspired by mechanistic interpretability in language models, where direction vectors in…

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

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit a troubling duality, capable of both remarkable generalization and brittle, verbatim memorization of their training data. This unpredictability undermines their reliability in high-stakes applications.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Xuanming Zhang

Language models (LMs) automatically learn word embeddings during pre-training on language corpora. Although word embeddings are usually interpreted as feature vectors for individual words, their roles in language model generation remain…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-07 Chi Han , Jialiang Xu , Manling Li , Yi Fung , Chenkai Sun , Nan Jiang , Tarek Abdelzaher , Heng Ji

Ensuring that Large Language Models (LLMs) generate text representative of diverse sub-populations is essential, particularly when key concepts related to under-represented groups are scarce in the training data. We address this challenge…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-17 Sabit Hassan , Anthony Sicilia , Malihe Alikhani

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Yongchao Chen , Harsh Jhamtani , Srinagesh Sharma , Chuchu Fan , Chi Wang

Quality-Diversity is a branch of stochastic optimization that is often applied to problems from the Reinforcement Learning and control domains in order to construct repertoires of well-performing policies/skills that exhibit diversity with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-28 Achkan Salehi , Stephane Doncieux

Despite the remarkable achievements of language models (LMs) across a broad spectrum of tasks, their propensity for generating toxic outputs remains a prevalent concern. Current solutions involving finetuning or auxiliary models usually…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-13 Yu Li , Han Jiang , Chuanyang Gong , Zhihua Wei

Subliminal learning describes a student language model inheriting a behavioral bias by fine-tuning on seemingly innocuous data generated by a biased teacher model. Prior work has begun to characterize this phenomenon but leaves open…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-29 George Morgulis , John Hewitt

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