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Related papers: KV Cache Steering for Controlling Frozen LLMs

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Representation steering offers a lightweight mechanism for controlling the behavior of large language models (LLMs) by intervening on internal activations at inference time. Most existing methods rely on a single global steering direction,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Laziz U. Abdullaev , Noelle Y. L. Wong , Ryan T. Z. Lee , Shiqi Jiang , Khoi N. M. Nguyen , Tan M. Nguyen

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Weixuan Wang , Minghao Wu , Barry Haddow , Alexandra Birch

The advancement of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) has enabled impressive perception capabilities. However, their reasoning process often remains a "fast thinking" paradigm, reliant on end-to-end generation or explicit,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Yiming Zhang , Qiangyu Yan , Borui Jiang , Kai Han

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-10 Stephen Cheng , Sarah Wiegreffe , Dinesh Manocha

Retrieval-augmented generation improves large language models' accuracy by adding relevant retrieved text to the prompt. Chunk level caching (CLC) accelerates inference by precomputing KV caches for these retrieved chunks and reusing them.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Samuel Cestola , Tianxiang Xia , Zheng Weiyan , Zheng Pengfei , Diego Didona

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a crucial paradigm for unlocking the advanced reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), encompassing frameworks like RLHF and RLAIF. Regardless of the specific optimization algorithm…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Rui Zhu , Weiheng Bai , Qiushi Wu , Yang Ren , Haixu Tang , Yuchu Liu

Large language models (LLMs) have shown great performance on complex reasoning tasks but often require generating long intermediate thoughts before reaching a final answer. During generation, LLMs rely on a key-value (KV) cache for…

The key-value (KV) cache is a foundational optimization in Transformer-based large language models (LLMs), eliminating redundant recomputation of past token representations during autoregressive generation. However, its memory footprint…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Yichun Xu , Navjot K. Khaira , Tejinder Singh

We propose a method of stacking multiple long short-term memory (LSTM) layers for modeling sentences. In contrast to the conventional stacked LSTMs where only hidden states are fed as input to the next layer, the suggested architecture…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-11-04 Jihun Choi , Taeuk Kim , Sang-goo Lee

Large language models have shown remarkable reasoning abilities and scaling laws suggest that large parameter count, especially along the depth axis, is the primary driver. In this work, we make a stronger claim -- many reasoning problems…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Nikunj Saunshi , Nishanth Dikkala , Zhiyuan Li , Sanjiv Kumar , Sashank J. Reddi

Large language models (LLMs) rely on key-value (KV) caches for efficient autoregressive decoding; however, cache size grows linearly with context length and model depth, becoming a major bottleneck in long-context inference. Prior KV cache…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Dmitry Akulov , Mohamed Sana , Antonio De Domenico , Tareq Si Salem , Nicola Piovesan , Fadhel Ayed

Researchers have been studying approaches to steer the behavior of Large Language Models (LLMs) and build personalized LLMs tailored for various applications. While fine-tuning seems to be a direct solution, it requires substantial…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-31 Yuanpu Cao , Tianrong Zhang , Bochuan Cao , Ziyi Yin , Lu Lin , Fenglong Ma , Jinghui Chen

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning is critical for improving the interpretability and reliability of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs). However, existing training algorithms such as SFT, PPO, and GRPO may not generalize well across unseen…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-31 Guohao Sun , Hang Hua , Jian Wang , Jiebo Luo , Sohail Dianat , Majid Rabbani , Raghuveer Rao , Zhiqiang Tao

Large language models have transformed AI, yet reliably controlling their outputs remains a challenge. This paper explores activation engineering, where outputs of pre-trained LLMs are controlled by manipulating their activations at…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2025-05-13 Joris Postmus , Steven Abreu

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in large-scale online services, enabling sophisticated applications. However, the computational overhead of generating key-value (KV) caches in the prefill stage presents a major…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-24 Shuowei Jin , Xueshen Liu , Qingzhao Zhang , Z. Morley Mao

Recent progress in large language models (LLMs) has focused on test-time scaling to improve reasoning via increased inference computation, but often at the cost of efficiency. We revisit test-time behavior and uncover a simple yet…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Zhen Yang , Mingyang Zhang , Feng Chen , Ganggui Ding , Liang Hou , Xin Tao , Ying-Cong Chen

Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities, but still struggle with complex reasoning tasks requiring multiple steps. While prompt-based methods like Chain-of-Thought (CoT) can improve LLM reasoning at inference time,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-11-25 Haolin Chen , Yihao Feng , Zuxin Liu , Weiran Yao , Akshara Prabhakar , Shelby Heinecke , Ricky Ho , Phil Mui , Silvio Savarese , Caiming Xiong , Huan Wang

Large language models (LLMs) often encode cognitive behaviors unpredictably across prompts, layers, and contexts, making them difficult to diagnose and control. We present CBMAS, a diagnostic framework for continuous activation steering,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Ahmed H. Ismail , Anthony Kuang , Ayo Akinkugbe , Kevin Zhu , Sean O'Brien

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved impressive performance across a range of natural language processing tasks. However, recent advances demonstrate that further gains particularly in complex reasoning tasks require more than merely…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-09 Wei Huang , Yizhe Xiong , Xin Ye , Zhijie Deng , Hui Chen , Zijia Lin , Guiguang Ding

Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive abilities in leveraging pretrained knowledge through prompting, but they often struggle with unseen tasks, particularly in data-scarce scenarios. While cross-task in-context learning offers…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-18 Xinyu Tang , Zhihao Lv , Xiaoxue Cheng , Junyi Li , Wayne Xin Zhao , Zujie Wen , Zhiqiang Zhang , Jun Zhou