English
Related papers

Related papers: RepIt: Steering Language Models with Concept-Speci…

200 papers

Steering, or direct manipulation of internal activations to guide LLM responses toward specific semantic concepts, is emerging as a promising avenue for both understanding how semantic concepts are stored within LLMs and advancing LLM…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Parmida Davarmanesh , Ashia Wilson , Adityanarayanan Radhakrishnan

With the rapid advancement of Vision Language Models (VLMs), refusal mechanisms have become a critical component for ensuring responsible and safe model behavior. However, existing refusal strategies are largely \textit{one-size-fits-all}…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Jiaxi Yang , Shicheng Liu , Yuchen Yang , Dongwon Lee

Activation steering has emerged as a promising approach for efficiently adapting large language models (LLMs) to downstream behaviors. However, most existing steering methods rely on a single static direction per task or concept, making…

Text generation has a fundamental limitation almost by definition: there is no taking back tokens that have been generated, even when they are clearly problematic. In the context of language model safety, when a partial unsafe generation is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-24 Yiming Zhang , Jianfeng Chi , Hailey Nguyen , Kartikeya Upasani , Daniel M. Bikel , Jason Weston , Eric Michael Smith

Large language models (LLMs) achieve high performance on mathematical reasoning, but these results can be inflated by training data leakage or superficial pattern matching rather than genuine reasoning. To this end, an adversarial…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Xinyuan Li , Murong Xu , Wenbiao Tao , Hanlun Zhu , Yike Zhao , Jipeng Zhang , Yunshi Lan

Inference-time intervention (ITI) has emerged as a promising method for steering large language model (LLM) behavior in a particular direction (e.g., improving helpfulness) by intervening on token representations without costly updates to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-10 Duy Nguyen , Archiki Prasad , Elias Stengel-Eskin , Mohit Bansal

Large language models (LLMs) are known to perpetuate stereotypes and exhibit biases. Various strategies have been proposed to mitigate these biases, but most work studies biases as a black-box problem without considering how concepts are…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-19 Hannah Cyberey , Yangfeng Ji , David Evans

The ability of language models in RAG systems to selectively refuse to answer based on flawed context is critical for safety, yet remains a significant failure point. Our large-scale study reveals that even frontier models struggle in this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Aashiq Muhamed , Leonardo F. R. Ribeiro , Markus Dreyer , Virginia Smith , Mona T. Diab

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

Large language models (LLMs) struggle with maintaining accurate knowledge due to conflicting/outdated parametric memories. While locate-and-edit methods address this, their reliance on models' internal representations leads to robustness…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-23 Jianhao Yan , Futing Wang , Yun Luo , Yafu Li , Yue Zhang

Reasoning has emerged as the next major frontier for language models (LMs), with rapid advances from both academic and industrial labs. However, this progress often outpaces methodological rigor, with many evaluations relying on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-08 Andreas Hochlehnert , Hardik Bhatnagar , Vishaal Udandarao , Samuel Albanie , Ameya Prabhu , Matthias Bethge

Vision Language Models (VLMs) have become essential backbones for multimodal intelligence, yet significant safety challenges limit their real-world application. While textual inputs are often effectively safeguarded, adversarial visual…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-02-11 Yi Ding , Bolian Li , Ruqi Zhang

Referring Expression Segmentation (RES) enables precise object segmentation in images based on natural language descriptions, offering high flexibility and broad applicability in real-world vision tasks. Despite its impressive performance,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Xingbai Chen , Tingchao Fu , Renyang Liu , Wei Zhou , Chao Yi

Language-vision understanding has driven the development of advanced perception systems, most notably the emerging paradigm of Referring Multi-Object Tracking (RMOT). By leveraging natural-language queries, RMOT systems can selectively…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Halima Bouzidi , Haoyu Liu , Mohammad Abdullah Al Faruque

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

Ensuring safe and appropriate responses from vision-language models (VLMs) remains a critical challenge, particularly in high-risk or ambiguous scenarios. We introduce SafeCoT, a lightweight, interpretable framework that leverages…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-06-12 Jiachen Ma , Zhanhui Zhou , Chao Yang , Chaochao Lu

Large language models exhibit safety degradation in non-English languages. Standard evaluation relies on Jailbreak Success Rate (JSR), which confounds several safety-driving factors into one, obscuring the specific cause(s) of safety…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Max Zhang , Ameen Patel , Sang T. Truong , Sanmi Koyejo

Vision-language models (VLMs), such as CLIP, have gained significant popularity as foundation models, with numerous fine-tuning methods developed to enhance performance on downstream tasks. However, due to their inherent vulnerability and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-28 Lijun Sheng , Jian Liang , Zilei Wang , Ran He

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

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in natural language understanding and generation, enabling their widespread adoption across various domains. However, their susceptibility to prompt injection attacks…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-05-05 Jinsheng Pan , Xiaogeng Liu , Chaowei Xiao