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Related papers: Activation Steering with a Feedback Controller

200 papers

The proportional-integral-derivative (PID) control law is often overlooked as a computational imitation of the critic control in human decision. This paper provides a formulation to remedy this problem. Further, based on the characteristic…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-06-11 Oluwasegun Ayokunle Somefun , Kayode Akingbade , Folasade Dahunsi

Controlling undesirable Large Language Model (LLM) behaviors, such as the generation of unsafe content or failing to adhere to safety guidelines, often relies on costly fine-tuning. Activation steering provides an alternative for…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Amr Hegazy , Mostafa Elhoushi , Amr Alanwar

Protein Language Models (PLMs), pre-trained on extensive evolutionary data from natural proteins, have emerged as indispensable tools for protein design. While powerful, PLMs often struggle to produce proteins with precisely specified…

Biomolecules · Quantitative Biology 2025-09-15 Long-Kai Huang , Rongyi Zhu , Bing He , Jianhua Yao

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

In this paper, we will consider a class of continuous-time stochastic control systems with both unknown nonlinear structure and unknown disturbances, and investigate the capability of the classical proportional-integral-derivative(PID)…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-03-21 Cheng Zhao , Shuo Yuan

Controlling the behavior of large language models (LLMs) at inference time is essential for aligning outputs with human abilities and safety requirements. \emph{Activation steering} provides a lightweight alternative to prompt engineering…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Diaoulé Diallo , Katharina Dworatzyk , Sophie Jentzsch , Peer Schütt , Sabine Theis , Tobias Hecking

Activation steering is a method for controlling Large Language Model (LLM) behavior by intervening in its internal representations to increase the alignment with a specific target feature direction. However, standard interventions, such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Tam Nguyen , Tu Anh Nguyen , Sina Alemohammad , Richard G. Baraniuk

Large Language Models employing extended chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning often suffer from the overthinking phenomenon, generating excessive and redundant reasoning steps that increase computational costs while potentially degrading…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Aryasomayajula Ram Bharadwaj

Language models (LMs) are typically post-trained for desired capabilities and behaviors via weight-based or prompt-based steering, but the former is time-consuming and expensive, and the latter is not precisely controllable and often…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Sasha Cui , Zhongren Chen

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…

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

Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) control is used for automatically regulating a measurable quantity to a desired setpoint. It is widely used in different types of classical control electronics. Here, we show how extending the feedback…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2026-04-20 Alberto Hijano , Tero T. Heikkilä

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…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-10-31 Anushka Sivakumar , Andrew Zhang , Zaber Hakim , Chris Thomas

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-12-08 Ole Jorgensen , Dylan Cope , Nandi Schoots , Murray Shanahan

The canonical proportional-integral-derivative (PID) control approach has been widely used in industrial application due to their simplicity and ease of use. However, its corresponding controller parameters are hard to be adjusted,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-05-05 Xiaojun Zhou

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable success in recent years, enabling a wide range of applications, including intelligent assistants that support users' daily life and work. A critical factor in building such assistants is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Xiaoyan Zhao , Ming Yan , Yilun Qiu , Haoting Ni , Yang Zhang , Fuli Feng , Hong Cheng , Tat-Seng Chua

Activation steering methods were shown to be effective in conditioning language model generation by additively intervening over models' intermediate representations. However, the evaluation of these techniques has so far been limited to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-02 Daniel Scalena , Gabriele Sarti , Malvina Nissim

Recent work has demonstrated the potential of contrastive steering for jailbreaking Large Language Models (LLMs). However, existing methods rely on limited and inherently biased contrastive prompts and require laborious manual tuning of…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Junxi Chen , Junhao Dong , Xiaohua Xie

Reflection, the ability of large language models (LLMs) to evaluate and revise their own reasoning, has been widely used to improve performance on complex reasoning tasks. Yet, most prior works emphasizes designing reflective prompting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-12 Fu-Chieh Chang , Yu-Ting Lee , Pei-Yuan Wu

Despite extensive efforts in safety alignment, large language models (LLMs) remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks. Activation steering offers a training-free defense method but relies on fixed steering coefficients, resulting in suboptimal…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Weixiang Zhao , Jiahe Guo , Yulin Hu , Yang Deng , An Zhang , Xingyu Sui , Xinyang Han , Yanyan Zhao , Bing Qin , Tat-Seng Chua , Ting Liu