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Recent advancements in Artificial Intelligence, particularly in Large Language Models (LLMs), have transformed natural language processing by improving generative capabilities. However, detecting biases embedded within these models remains…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-11 Suvendu Mohanty

A key challenge in AI alignment is guiding large language models (LLMs) to follow desired behaviors at test time. Activation steering, which modifies internal model activations during inference, offers a potential solution. However, prior…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Reza Bayat , Ali Rahimi-Kalahroudi , Mohammad Pezeshki , Sarath Chandar , Pascal Vincent

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

Activation steering methods control large language model (LLM) behavior by modifying internal activations at inference time. However, most existing activation steering methods rely on a fixed steering strength, leading to either…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-16 Arthur Vogels , Benjamin Wong , Yann Choho , Annabelle Blangero , Milan Bhan

As machine learning methods are deployed in real-world settings such as healthcare, legal systems, and social science, it is crucial to recognize how they shape social biases and stereotypes in these sensitive decision-making processes.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-06-25 Paul Pu Liang , Chiyu Wu , Louis-Philippe Morency , Ruslan Salakhutdinov

Controlling the behavior of large language models (LLMs) at inference time is essential for aligning outputs with human abilities and safety requirements. \emph{Activation steering} provides a lightweight alternative to prompt engineering…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Diaoulé Diallo , Katharina Dworatzyk , Sophie Jentzsch , Peer Schütt , Sabine Theis , Tobias Hecking

Although value-aligned language models (LMs) appear unbiased in explicit bias evaluations, they often exhibit stereotypes in implicit word association tasks, raising concerns about their fair usage. We investigate the mechanisms behind this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Lihao Sun , Chengzhi Mao , Valentin Hofmann , Xuechunzi Bai

Linear activation steering is a powerful approach for eliciting the capabilities of large language models and specializing their behavior using limited labeled data. While effective, existing methods often apply a fixed steering strength to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Brandon Hsu , Daniel Beaglehole , Adityanarayanan Radhakrishnan , Mikhail Belkin

The rise of large language models (LLMs) has prompted increasing interest in their use as in-context learning agents. At the core of agentic behavior is the capacity for exploration, or the ability to actively gather information about the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-14 Nate Rahn , Pierluca D'Oro , Marc G. Bellemare

Activation steering is a method for controlling Large Language Model (LLM) behavior by intervening in its internal representations to increase the alignment with a specific target feature direction. However, standard interventions, such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Tam Nguyen , Tu Anh Nguyen , Sina Alemohammad , Richard G. Baraniuk

Changing the behavior of large language models (LLMs) can be as straightforward as editing the Transformer's residual streams using appropriately constructed "steering vectors." These modifications to internal neural activations, a form of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Jian-Qiao Zhu , Haijiang Yan , Thomas L. Griffiths

Algorithmic audits are essential tools for examining systems for properties required by regulators or desired by operators. Current audits of large language models (LLMs) primarily rely on black-box evaluations that assess model behavior…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Hannah Cyberey , Yangfeng Ji , David Evans

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

Rapid advancements of large language models (LLMs) have enabled the processing, understanding, and generation of human-like text, with increasing integration into systems that touch our social sphere. Despite this success, these models can…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-16 Isabel O. Gallegos , Ryan A. Rossi , Joe Barrow , Md Mehrab Tanjim , Sungchul Kim , Franck Dernoncourt , Tong Yu , Ruiyi Zhang , Nesreen K. Ahmed

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive performance in natural language tasks, but their outputs can exhibit undesirable attributes or biases. Existing methods for steering LLMs toward desired attributes often assume unbiased…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-05 Zhixuan Chu , Yan Wang , Longfei Li , Zhibo Wang , Zhan Qin , Kui Ren

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-10 Niklas Herbster , Martin Zborowski , Alberto Tosato , Gauthier Gidel , Tommaso Tosato

Protein Language Models (PLMs), pre-trained on extensive evolutionary data from natural proteins, have emerged as indispensable tools for protein design. While powerful, PLMs often struggle to produce proteins with precisely specified…

Biomolecules · Quantitative Biology 2025-09-15 Long-Kai Huang , Rongyi Zhu , Bing He , Jianhua Yao

Large Language Models (LLMs) inherit explicit and implicit biases from their training datasets. Identifying and mitigating biases in LLMs is crucial to ensure fair outputs, as they can perpetuate harmful stereotypes and misinformation. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-19 Fatima Kazi , Alex Young , Yash Inani , Setareh Rafatirad

Modern large language models (LLMs) are typically secured by auditing data, prompts, and refusal policies, while treating the forward pass as an implementation detail. We show that intermediate activations in decoder-only LLMs form a…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-11-24 Zhiyuan Xu , Stanislav Abaimov , Joseph Gardiner , Sana Belguith

Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate biased responses. Yet previous direct probing techniques contain either gender mentions or predefined gender stereotypes, which are challenging to comprehensively collect. Hence, we propose an…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-20 Xiangjue Dong , Yibo Wang , Philip S. Yu , James Caverlee