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

As the widespread adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) accelerates, token consumption from intermediate reasoning traces increasingly contributes to inference latency and operational cost. Recent studies suggest that many real-world…

Recently, steering vectors (SVs) have emerged as an effective and lightweight approach to steer behaviors of large language models (LLMs), among which fine-tuned SVs are more effective than optimization-free ones. However, current…

As the development and application of Large Language Models (LLMs) continue to advance rapidly, enhancing their trustworthiness and aligning them with human preferences has become a critical area of research. Traditional methods rely…

We introduce a new unsupervised pretraining objective for reinforcement learning. During the unsupervised reward-free pretraining phase, the agent maximizes mutual information between tasks and states induced by the policy. Our key…

Existing tool-augmented agentic systems are limited in the real world by (i) black-box reasoning steps that undermine trust of decision-making and pose safety risks, (ii) poor multimodal integration, which is inherently critical for…

This work introduces SteerVLM, a lightweight steering module designed to guide Vision-Language Models (VLMs) towards outputs that better adhere to desired instructions. Our approach learns from the latent embeddings of paired prompts…

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…

The demand for efficient large language model (LLM) inference has intensified the focus on sparsification techniques. While semi-structured (N:M) pruning is well-established for weights, its application to activation pruning remains…

Safety detection models require examples of HHH (Helpful, Harmless, Honest)-violating outputs for robust generalization, however such examples are scarce. Activation Steering (AS) has emerged as a data-efficient method for generating…

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…

Machine learning (ML) is playing an increasingly important role in scientific research. In conjunction with classical statistical approaches, ML-assisted analytical strategies have shown great promise in accelerating research findings. This…

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit impressive capabilities in generation tasks but are prone to producing harmful, misleading, or biased content, posing significant ethical and safety concerns. To mitigate such risks, representation…

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…

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across various real-world tasks. However, they often struggle to fully comprehend and effectively utilize their input contexts, resulting in responses that are unfaithful…

Steering vectors are a lightweight method to control language model behavior by adding a learned bias to the activations at inference time. Although steering demonstrates promising performance, recent work shows that it can be unreliable or…

Exploration remains a key bottleneck for reinforcement learning (RL) post-training of large language models (LLMs), where sparse feedback and large action spaces can lead to premature collapse into repetitive behaviors. We propose…

Activation steering has emerged as a cost-effective paradigm for modifying large language model (LLM) behaviors. Existing methods typically intervene at the block level, steering the bundled activations of selected attention heads,…

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated proficiency across various natural language processing (NLP) tasks but often require additional training, such as continual pre-training and supervised fine-tuning. However, the costs…

Large language models (LLMs) often produce confident but incorrect answers in settings where abstention would be safer. Standard evaluation protocols, however, require a response and do not account for how confidence should guide decisions…

A popular approach to post-training control of large language models (LLMs) is the steering of intermediate latent representations. Namely, identify a well-chosen direction depending on the task at hand and perturbs representations along…