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Activation steering is a promising technique for controlling LLM behavior by adding semantically meaningful vectors directly into a model's hidden states during inference. It is often framed as a precise, interpretable, and potentially…

Prompt engineering and finetuning aim to maximize language model performance on a given metric (like toxicity reduction). However, these methods do not fully elicit a model's capabilities. To reduce this gap, we introduce activation…

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) excel at zero-shot inference but often degrade under test-time domain shifts. For this reason, episodic test-time adaptation strategies have recently emerged as powerful techniques for adapting VLMs to a single…

Large language models (LLMs) can be controlled at inference time through prompts (in-context learning) and internal activations (activation steering). Different accounts have been proposed to explain these methods, yet their common goal of…

Accent variability remains a major errors in automatic speech recognition, yet most adaptation methods rely on parameter fine-tuning without understanding where accent information is encoded. We treat accent variation as an interpretable…

By conditioning on natural language instructions, large language models (LLMs) have displayed impressive capabilities as general-purpose computers. However, task performance depends significantly on the quality of the prompt used to steer…

Large language models (LLMs) excel at mathematical reasoning and logical problem-solving. The current popular training paradigms primarily use supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL) to enhance the models' reasoning…

Language models (LMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in NLP, yet adapting them efficiently and robustly to specific tasks remains challenging. As their scale and complexity grow, fine-tuning LMs on labelled data often…

Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have garnered increasing attention in the field of natural language processing, revolutionizing numerous downstream tasks with powerful reasoning and generation abilities. For example, In-Context…

Alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs) is the ability to satisfy desired objectives during generation, which is critical for trustworthy deployment. In practice, alignment is often operationalized through multiple objectives such as…

We introduce Contrastive Activation Addition (CAA), an innovative method for steering language models by modifying their activations during forward passes. CAA computes "steering vectors" by averaging the difference in residual stream…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely used by software engineers for programming tasks. However, research shows that LLMs often lack a deep understanding of program semantics. Even minor changes to syntax, such as renaming variables, can…

Prompt-based learning is susceptible to intrinsic bias present in pre-trained language models (LMs), leading to sub-optimal performance in prompt-based zero/few-shot settings. In this work, we propose a null-input prompting method to…

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.…

Language models (LMs) trained on vast quantities of unlabelled data have greatly advanced the field of natural language processing (NLP). In this study, we re-visit the widely accepted notion in NLP that continued pre-training LMs on…

Reinforcement learning (RL) for large language models (LLMs) is dominated by the cost of rollout generation, which has motivated the use of low-precision rollouts (e.g., FP8) paired with a BF16 trainer to improve throughput and reduce…

Early diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease (AD) is crucial in facilitating preventive care and to delay further progression. Speech based automatic AD screening systems provide a non-intrusive and more scalable alternative to other clinical…

Test-time optimization remains impractical at scale due to prohibitive inference costs--techniques like iterative refinement and multi-step verification can require $10-100\times$ more compute per query than standard decoding. Latent space…

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) identifies sentiment information related to specific aspects and provides deeper market insights to businesses and organizations. With the emergence of large language models (LMs), recent studies have…

Recent advancements in multilingual automatic speech recognition (ASR) have been driven by large-scale end-to-end models like Whisper. However, challenges such as language interference and expanding to unseen languages (language expansion)…