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Related papers: Language steering in latent space to mitigate unin…

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Steering language model generation toward desired textual properties is essential for practical deployment, and inference-time methods are particularly appealing because they enable controllable generation without retraining. Recent work…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Hyeseon An , Yo-Sub Han

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-08-13 Shivam Dubey

Cross-lingual alignment (CLA) aims to align multilingual representations, enabling Large Language Models (LLMs) to seamlessly transfer knowledge across languages. While intuitive, we hypothesize, this pursuit of representational convergence…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-31 HyoJung Han , Sweta Agrawal , Eleftheria Briakou

Deterministically controlling the target generation language of large multilingual language models (LLMs) remains a fundamental challenge, particularly in zero-shot settings where neither explicit language prompts nor fine-tuning are…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-17 Cheng-Ting Chou , George Liu , Jessica Sun , Cole Blondin , Kevin Zhu , Vasu Sharma , Sean O'Brien

Steering large language models (LLMs) is usually done by either instruction prompting or activation steering. Prompting often gives strong control, but caches guidance tokens at every layer and can clutter long interactions; activation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Andy Zeyi Liu , Michael Zhang , Ilana Greenberg , Adam Alnasser , Lucas Baker , John Sous

Understanding the latent space geometry of large language models (LLMs) is key to interpreting their behavior and improving alignment. Yet it remains unclear to what extent LLMs linearly organize representations related to semantic…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-22 Baturay Saglam , Paul Kassianik , Blaine Nelson , Sajana Weerawardhena , Yaron Singer , Amin Karbasi

While large language models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable success in multilingual translation, their internal core translation mechanisms, even at the fundamental word level, remain insufficiently understood. To address this critical gap,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-16 Hongbin Zhang , Kehai Chen , Xuefeng Bai , Xiucheng Li , Yang Xiang , Min Zhang

Large language models (LLMs) excel at diverse tasks, but their deployment on resource-constrained devices remains challenging. Existing methods like quantization, pruning, and distillation can reduce memory footprint but often demand…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Siddharth Tandon

Controlling multiple behavioral attributes in large language models (LLMs) at inference time is a challenging problem due to interference between attributes and the limitations of linear steering methods, which assume additive behavior in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Narmeen Oozeer , Luke Marks , Shreyans Jain , Fazl Barez , Amirali Abdullah

It is a critical challenge to efficiently unlock the powerful reasoning potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) for specific tasks or new distributions. Existing test-time adaptation methods often require tuning model parameters, which is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-05 Xinyue Kang , Diwei Shi , Li Chen

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-28 Quy-Anh Dang , Chris Ngo

Precise control over language model generation is vital for ensuring both safety and reliability. Although prompt engineering and steering are commonly used to intervene in model behaviors, the vast number of parameters in models often…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Mengru Wang , Ziwen Xu , Shengyu Mao , Shumin Deng , Zhaopeng Tu , Huajun Chen , Ningyu Zhang

Prior work on controllable text generation has focused on learning how to control language models through trainable decoding, smart-prompt design, or fine-tuning based on a desired objective. We hypothesize that the information needed to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-05-12 Nishant Subramani , Nivedita Suresh , Matthew E. Peters

Steering methods have emerged as effective and targeted tools for guiding large language models' (LLMs) behavior without modifying their parameters. Multimodal large language models (MLLMs), however, do not currently enjoy the same suite of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-21 Woody Haosheng Gan , Deqing Fu , Julian Asilis , Ollie Liu , Dani Yogatama , Vatsal Sharan , Robin Jia , Willie Neiswanger

Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive abilities in leveraging pretrained knowledge through prompting, but they often struggle with unseen tasks, particularly in data-scarce scenarios. While cross-task in-context learning offers…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-18 Xinyu Tang , Zhihao Lv , Xiaoxue Cheng , Junyi Li , Wayne Xin Zhao , Zujie Wen , Zhiqiang Zhang , Jun Zhou

Recent work on activation and latent steering has demonstrated that modifying internal representations can effectively guide large language models (LLMs) toward improved reasoning and efficiency without additional training. However, most…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-07 Tuc Nguyen , Thai Le

Changing the behavior of large language models (LLMs) can be as straightforward as editing the Transformer's residual streams using appropriately constructed "steering vectors." These modifications to internal neural activations, a form of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Jian-Qiao Zhu , Haijiang Yan , Thomas L. Griffiths

Researchers have been studying approaches to steer the behavior of Large Language Models (LLMs) and build personalized LLMs tailored for various applications. While fine-tuning seems to be a direct solution, it requires substantial…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-31 Yuanpu Cao , Tianrong Zhang , Bochuan Cao , Ziyi Yin , Lu Lin , Fenglong Ma , Jinghui Chen

Language confusion -- where large language models (LLMs) generate unintended languages against the user's need -- remains a critical challenge, especially for English-centric models. We present the first mechanistic interpretability (MI)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-19 Ercong Nie , Helmut Schmid , Hinrich Schütze

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) enable feature-level mechanistic interpretability and activation steering in large language models (LLMs), but SAE-based language control remains unreliable in multilingual settings: most SAEs are trained on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Yusser Al Ghussin , Daniil Gurgurov , Tanja Baeumel , Josef van Genabith , Patrick Schramowski , Simon Ostermann