Related papers: Mitigating Over-Refusal in Aligned Large Language …
A key challenge in AI alignment is guiding large language models (LLMs) to follow desired behaviors at test time. Activation steering, which modifies internal model activations during inference, offers a potential solution. However, prior…
With the rapid development of large language models (LLMs), they are not only used as general-purpose AI assistants but are also customized through further fine-tuning to meet the requirements of different applications. A pivotal factor in…
Home Energy Management Systems (HEMSs) help households tailor their electricity usage based on power system signals such as energy prices. This technology helps to reduce energy bills and offers greater demand-side flexibility that supports…
Reinforcement learning has become the central approach for language models (LMs) to learn from environmental reward or feedback. In practice, the environmental feedback is usually sparse and delayed. Learning from such signals is…
Large language models (LLMs), despite possessing latent safety understanding from their vast pretraining data, remain vulnerable to generating harmful content and exhibit issues such as over-refusal and utility degradation after safety…
Refusal on harmful prompts is a key safety behaviour in instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs), yet the internal causes of this behaviour remain poorly understood. We study two public instruction-tuned models, Gemma-2-2B-IT and…
Safety alignment -- training large language models (LLMs) to refuse harmful requests while remaining helpful -- is critical for responsible deployment. Prior work established that safety behaviors are governed by low-rank structures,…
Increasing global energy demand and renewable integration complexity have placed buildings at the center of sustainable energy management. We present a three-step reinforcement learning(RL)-based Building Energy Management System (BEMS)…
Safety alignment is crucial for large language models (LLMs) to resist malicious instructions but often results in over-refusals, where benign prompts are unnecessarily rejected, impairing user experience and model utility. We introduce…
Large language models (LLMs) are now ubiquitous in everyday tools, raising urgent safety concerns about their tendency to generate harmful content. The dominant safety approach -- reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) --…
The rise of large language models (LLMs) has prompted increasing interest in their use as in-context learning agents. At the core of agentic behavior is the capacity for exploration, or the ability to actively gather information about the…
In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have had great success in tasks such as casual conversation, contributing to significant advancements in domains like virtual assistance. However, they often generate responses that are not…
Massively multilingual sentence representation models, e.g., LASER, SBERT-distill, and LaBSE, help significantly improve cross-lingual downstream tasks. However, the use of a large amount of data or inefficient model architectures results…
Large language models (LLMs) frequently produce false refusals, declining benign requests that contain terms resembling unsafe queries. We address this challenge by introducing two comprehensive benchmarks: the Exaggerated Safety Benchmark…
Model-based planning holds great promise for improving both sample efficiency and generalization in reinforcement learning (RL). We show that energy-based models (EBMs) are a promising class of models to use for model-based planning. EBMs…
As large language models (LLMs) become more integrated into societal systems, the risk of them perpetuating and amplifying harmful biases becomes a critical safety concern. Traditional methods for mitigating bias often rely on data…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success across domains such as healthcare, education, and cybersecurity. However, this openness also introduces significant security risks, particularly through embedding space…
We propose affine concept editing (ACE) as an approach for steering language models' behavior by intervening directly in activations. We begin with an affine decomposition of model activation vectors and show that prior methods for steering…
Safety-aligned large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world pipelines, yet this deployment also enlarges the supply-chain attack surface: adversaries can distribute backdoored checkpoints that behave normally under…
Large language model pretraining is compute-intensive, yet many tokens contribute marginally to learning, resulting in inefficiency. We introduce Efficient Selective Language Modeling (ESLM), a risk-aware algorithm that improves training…