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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…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-08-13 Mansi Phute , Ravikumar Balakrishnan

Recent advances in automated theorem proving use Large Language Models (LLMs) to translate informal mathematical statements into formal proofs. However, informal cues are often ambiguous or lack strict logical structure, making it hard for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Shashank Kirtania , Arun Iyer

Activation-based steering enables Large Language Models (LLMs) to exhibit targeted behaviors by intervening on intermediate activations without retraining. Despite its widespread use, the mechanistic factors that govern when steering…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-13 Mehdi Jafari , Hao Xue , Flora Salim

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…

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

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) often exhibit significant modality preference, which is a tendency to favor one modality over another. Depending on the input, they may over-rely on linguistic priors relative to visual evidence, or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-16 Zihan Huang , Xintong Li , Rohan Surana , Tong Yu , Rui Wang , Julian McAuley , Jingbo Shang , Junda Wu

We present a novel approach to bias mitigation in large language models (LLMs) by applying steering vectors to modify model activations in forward passes. We compute 8 steering vectors, each corresponding to a different social bias axis,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Zara Siddique , Irtaza Khalid , Liam D. Turner , Luis Espinosa-Anke

Despite the success of Instruction Tuning (IT) in training large language models (LLMs), such models often leverage spurious or biased features learnt from their training data and can become misaligned, leading to undesired behaviours.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Tom A. Lamb , Adam Davies , Alasdair Paren , Philip H. S. Torr , Francesco Pinto

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

Steering a car through traffic is a complex task that is difficult to cast into algorithms. Therefore, researchers turn to training artificial neural networks from front-facing camera data stream along with the associated steering angles.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-11-23 Hesham M. Eraqi , Mohamed N. Moustafa , Jens Honer

Large language models can be steered at inference time through prompting or activation interventions, but activation steering methods often underperform compared to prompt-based approaches. We propose a framework that formulates prompt…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-06 Geert Heyman , Frederik Vandeputte

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have led to the development of thinking language models that generate extensive internal reasoning chains before producing responses. While these models achieve improved performance,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-23 Constantin Venhoff , Iván Arcuschin , Philip Torr , Arthur Conmy , Neel Nanda

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

In autonomous driving, end-to-end (E2E) driving systems that predict control commands directly from sensor data have achieved significant advancements. For safe driving in unexpected scenarios, these systems may additionally rely on human…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Seo Hyun Kim , Jin Bok Park , Do Yeon Koo , Hogun Park , Il Yong Chun

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

Large language model (LLM) steering has emerged as a promising paradigm for controlling model behavior at inference time through targeted manipulation of hidden states, offering a lightweight alternative to expensive retraining. However,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Haolei Xu , Xinyu Mei , Yuchen Yan , Rui Zhou , Wenqi Zhang , Weiming Lu , Yueting Zhuang , Yongliang Shen

In this work, we propose a training-free method to inject visual prompts into Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) through test-time optimization of a learnable latent variable. We observe that attention, as the core module of MLLMs,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-01-08 Mingrui Wu , Xinyue Cai , Jiayi Ji , Jiale Li , Oucheng Huang , Gen Luo , Hao Fei , Guannan Jiang , Xiaoshuai Sun , Rongrong Ji

Role-playing has emerged as an effective technique for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, existing methods primarily rely on prompt engineering, which often lacks stability and interpretability.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Anyi Wang , Dong Shu , Yifan Wang , Yunpu Ma , Mengnan Du

Large Language Models (LLMs), despite advances in instruction tuning, often fail to follow complex user instructions. Activation steering techniques aim to mitigate this by manipulating model internals, but have a potential risk of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Minjae Kang , Jaehyung Kim

One-to-one tutoring is one of the most efficient methods of teaching. With the growing popularity of Large Language Models (LLMs), there have been efforts to create LLM based conversational tutors which can expand the benefits of one to one…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2025-03-20 Romain Puech , Jakub Macina , Julia Chatain , Mrinmaya Sachan , Manu Kapur