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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

Precise control over language model generation is vital for ensuring both safety and reliability. Although prompt engineering and steering are commonly used to intervene in model behaviors, the vast number of parameters in models often…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Mengru Wang , Ziwen Xu , Shengyu Mao , Shumin Deng , Zhaopeng Tu , Huajun Chen , Ningyu Zhang

The mechanisms by which reasoning training reshapes LLMs' internal computations remain unclear. We study lightweight steering vectors inserted into the base model's residual stream and trained with a reinforcement-learning objective. These…

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-05 Chebrolu Niranjan , Kokil Jaidka , Gerard Christopher Yeo

As they become increasingly multilingual, Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit more language confusion, i.e., they tend to generate answers in a language different from the language of the prompt or the answer language explicitly requested…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-19 Hannah Sterz , Fabian David Schmidt , Goran Glavaš , Ivan Vulić

Large language models (LLMs) often exhibit undesirable behaviors, such as safety violations and hallucinations. Although inference-time steering offers a cost-effective way to adjust model behavior without updating its parameters, existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-20 Zixuan Weng , Jinghuai Zhang , Kunlin Cai , Ying Li , Peiran Wang , Yuan Tian

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly serve as automated evaluators, yet they suffer from "self-preference bias": a tendency to favor their own outputs over those of other models. This bias undermines fairness and reliability in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-05 Dani Roytburg , Matthew Bozoukov , Matthew Nguyen , Jou Barzdukas , Simon Fu , Narmeen Oozeer

If large language models operate in a universal semantic space, then switching between languages should require only a simple activation offset. To test this, we take multilingual in-context learning as a case study, where few-shot…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Neeraja Kirtane , Kuan-Hao Huang

Due to the advantages of hypergraphs in modeling high-order relationships in complex systems, they have been applied to higher-order clustering, hypergraph neural networks and computer vision. These applications rely heavily on access to…

Social and Information Networks · Computer Science 2025-10-15 Bingqiao Gu , Jiale Zeng , Xingqin Qi , Dong Li

Despite significant progress in alignment, large language models (LLMs) remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks that elicit harmful behaviors. Activation steering techniques offer a promising inference-time intervention approach, but…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-28 Quy-Anh Dang , Chris Ngo

Latent space steering methods provide a practical approach to controlling large language models by applying steering vectors to intermediate activations, guiding outputs toward desired behaviors while avoiding retraining. Despite their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Shawn Im , Sharon Li

Large language models (LLMs) require precise behavior control for safe and effective deployment across diverse applications. Activation steering offers a promising approach for LLMs' behavioral control. We focus on the question of how…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Tetiana Bas , Krystian Novak

As foundation models grow in capability, the ability to efficiently and reliably control their behavior becomes critical. Fine-tuning these models can be costly, and while prompting can be practical for controllability, it remains fragile…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Valentino Maiorca , Eleonora Gualdoni , Xavier Suau , Marco Cuturi , Luca Zappella , Pau Rodríguez

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

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) exhibit outstanding performance on vision-language tasks but struggle with hallucination problems. Through in-depth analysis of LVLM activation patterns, we reveal two key findings: 1) truthfulness and…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-02-26 Jianghao Yin , Qin Chen , Kedi Chen , Jie Zhou , Xingjiao Wu , Liang He

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

Steering has emerged as a practical approach to enable post-hoc guidance of LLMs towards enforcing a specific behavior. However, it remains largely underexplored for multimodal LLMs (MLLMs); furthermore, existing steering techniques, such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Jayneel Parekh , Pegah Khayatan , Mustafa Shukor , Arnaud Dapogny , Alasdair Newson , Matthieu Cord

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

Large language models (LLMs) can sometimes detect when they are being evaluated and adjust their behavior to appear more aligned, compromising the reliability of safety evaluations. In this paper, we show that adding a steering vector to an…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Tim Tian Hua , Andrew Qin , Samuel Marks , Neel Nanda

Understanding and controlling the behavior of large language models (LLMs) is an increasingly important topic in multilingual NLP. Beyond prompting or fine-tuning, , i.e.,~manipulating internal representations during inference, has emerged…