Related papers: Painless Activation Steering: An Automated, Lightw…

A wide range of NLP tasks benefit from the fine-tuning of pretrained language models (PLMs). However, a number of redundant parameters which contribute less to the downstream task are observed in a directly fine-tuned model. We consider the…

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…

Large language models (LLMs) excel at generating fluent text, but their internal reasoning remains opaque and difficult to control. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) make hidden activations more interpretable by exposing latent features that often…

We present Fusion Steering, an activation steering methodology that improves factual accuracy in large language models (LLMs) for question-answering (QA) tasks. This approach introduces flexible steering configurations, including full-layer…

Activation steering promises to be an extremely parameter-efficient form of adaptation, but its effectiveness depends on critical design choices -- such as intervention location and parameterization -- that currently rely on empirical…

As large language models (LLMs) improve in their capacity to serve as personal AI assistants, their ability to output uniquely tailored, personalized responses that align with the soft preferences of their users is essential for enhancing…

Safety alignment of large language models currently faces a central challenge: existing alignment techniques often prioritize mitigating responses to harmful prompts at the expense of overcautious behavior, leading models to incorrectly…

Aligning general-purpose large language models (LLMs) to downstream tasks often incurs significant training adjustment costs. Prior research has explored various avenues to enhance alignment efficiency, primarily through minimal-data…

Reliable behavior control is central to deploying large language models (LLMs) on the web. Activation steering offers a tuning-free route to align attributes (e.g., truthfulness) that ensure trustworthy generation. Prevailing approaches…

Speech emotion recognition (SER) has drawn increasing attention for its applications in human-machine interaction. However, existing SER methods ignore the information gap between the pre-training speech recognition task and the downstream…

Teleoperating high degrees-of-freedom (DoF) robotic manipulators via low-DoF controllers like joysticks often requires frequent switching between control modes, where each mode maps controller movements to specific robot actions. Manually…

Soft prompt learning has recently emerged as one of the methods of choice for adapting V&L models to a downstream task using a few training examples. However, current methods significantly overfit the training data, suffering from large…

Large Language Models (LLMs) often generate inconsistent responses when prompted with semantically equivalent paraphrased inputs. Recently, activation steering, a technique that modulates LLMs' behaviours by adjusting their latent…

Intervention-based model steering offers a lightweight and interpretable alternative to prompting and fine-tuning. However, by adapting strong optimization objectives from fine-tuning, current methods are susceptible to overfitting and…

Recent work in activation steering has demonstrated the potential to better control the outputs of Large Language Models (LLMs), but it involves finding steering vectors. This is difficult because engineers do not typically know how…

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…

We introduce Mechanistic Error Reduction with Abstention (MERA), a principled framework for steering language models (LMs) to mitigate errors through selective, adaptive interventions. Unlike existing methods that rely on fixed, manually…

Sparse activation, which selectively activates only an input-dependent set of neurons in inference, is a useful technique to reduce the computing cost of Large Language Models (LLMs) without retraining or adaptation efforts. However,…

Text-to-speech (TTS) has shown great progress in recent years. However, most existing TTS systems offer only coarse and rigid emotion control, typically via discrete emotion labels or a carefully crafted and detailed emotional text prompt,…

Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) to cater to different human preferences, learning new skills, and unlearning harmful behavior is an important problem. Search-based methods, such as Best-of-N or Monte-Carlo Tree Search, are performant,…