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Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) can extract interpretable features from large language models (LLMs) without supervision. However, their effectiveness in downstream steering tasks is limited by the requirement for contrastive datasets or large…
Recent advancements in large reasoning models (LRMs) have significantly enhanced language models' capabilities in complex problem-solving by emulating human-like deliberative thinking. However, these models often exhibit overthinking (i.e.,…
Deploying LLMs in real-world applications requires controllable output that satisfies multiple desiderata at the same time. While existing work extensively addresses LLM steering for a single behavior, \textit{compositional steering} --…
Steering vectors (SVs) have been proposed as an effective approach to adjust language model behaviour at inference time by intervening on intermediate model activations. They have shown promise in terms of improving both capabilities and…
Applying steering vectors to large language models (LLMs) is an efficient and effective model alignment technique, but we lack an interpretable explanation for how it works-- specifically, what internal mechanisms steering vectors affect…
Vision Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly being used in a broad range of applications, bringing their security and behavioral control to the forefront. While existing approaches for behavioral control or output redirection, like system…
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in learning algorithms, evaluations, and optimization tasks. Recent studies have shown that using LLM-based optimizers to automatically optimize model prompts, demonstrations, predictions…
As Vision Language Models (VLMs) are deployed across safety-critical applications, understanding and controlling their behavioral patterns has become increasingly important. Existing behavioral control methods face significant limitations:…
As large language models (LLMs) show impressive performance on complex tasks, they still struggle with longer contextual understanding and high computational costs. To balance efficiency and quality, we introduce LLMSteer, a…
Activation steering is a popular white-box control technique that modifies model activations to elicit an abstract change in its behavior. It has also become a standard tool in interpretability (e.g., probing truthfulness, or translating…
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…
Recent advancements in speech large language models (SpeechLLMs) have attracted considerable attention. Nonetheless, current methods exhibit suboptimal performance in adhering to speech instructions. Notably, the intelligence of models…
Activation steering, or representation engineering, offers a lightweight approach to align large language models (LLMs) by manipulating their internal activations at inference time. However, current methods suffer from two key limitations:…
Instruction-based text editing is increasingly critical for real-world applications such as code editors (e.g., Cursor), but Large Language Models (LLMs) continue to struggle with this task. Unlike free-form generation, editing requires…
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…
Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has improved the reasoning performance of large language models (LLMs), but it remains unclear why it works and whether it is the unique mechanism for triggering reasoning in large language models. In this…
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…
Recent advances in Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in solving complex tasks such as mathematics and coding. However, these models frequently exhibit a phenomenon known as overthinking during…
System prompts provide a lightweight yet powerful mechanism for conditioning large language models (LLMs) at inference time. While prior work has focused on English-only settings, real-world deployments benefit from having a single prompt…
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…