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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

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

Complex social behaviors, such as empathy and strategic politeness, are widely assumed to resist the directional decomposition that makes activation steering effective for coarse attributes like sentiment or toxicity. We present STAR:…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-18 Niranjan Chebrolu , Kokil Jaidka , Gerard Christopher Yeo

Subliminal learning describes a student language model inheriting a behavioral bias by fine-tuning on seemingly innocuous data generated by a biased teacher model. Prior work has begun to characterize this phenomenon but leaves open…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-29 George Morgulis , John Hewitt

Autonomous driving technology is progressing rapidly, largely due to complex End To End systems based on deep neural networks. While these systems are effective, their complexity can make it difficult to understand their behavior, raising…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-12-24 Iqra Aslam , Igor Anpilogov , Andreas Rausch

An adaptive guidance system that supports equipment operators requires a comprehensive model, which involves a variety of user behaviors that considers different skill and knowledge levels, as well as rapid-changing task situations. In the…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2020-09-17 Chen Long-fei , Yuichi Nakamura , Kazuaki Kondo

Model steering, which involves intervening on hidden representations at inference time, has emerged as a lightweight alternative to finetuning for precisely controlling large language models. While steering efficacy has been widely studied,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-09 Navita Goyal , Hal Daumé

Steering language models (LMs) by modifying internal activations is a popular approach for controlling text generation. Unsupervised dictionary learning methods, e.g., sparse autoencoders, can be scaled to produce many steering vectors, but…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-05 Jiuding Sun , Sidharth Baskaran , Zhengxuan Wu , Michael Sklar , Christopher Potts , Atticus Geiger

Current large language models have dangerous capabilities, which are likely to become more problematic in the future. Activation steering techniques can be used to reduce risks from these capabilities. In this paper, we investigate the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-12 Teun van der Weij , Massimo Poesio , Nandi Schoots

Activation steering has emerged as a promising alternative for controlling language-model behavior at inference time by modifying intermediate representations while keeping model parameters frozen. However, large-scale evaluations such as…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Zehao Jin , Ruixuan Deng , Junran Wang , Xinjie Shen , Chao Zhang

Large Language Models (LLMs) often generate inconsistent responses when prompted with semantically equivalent paraphrased inputs. Recently, activation steering, a technique that modulates LLMs' behaviours by adjusting their latent…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-23 Jingyuan Yang , Rongjun Li , Weixuan Wang , Ziyu Zhou , Zhiyong Feng , Wei Peng

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are a promising path to realizing generalist embodied agents that can quickly adapt to new tasks, modalities, and environments. However, methods for interpreting and steering VLAs fall far short of…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Bear Häon , Kaylene Stocking , Ian Chuang , Claire Tomlin

As vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly deployed in open-world scenarios, they can be easily induced by visual jailbreak attacks to generate harmful content, posing serious risks to model safety and trustworthy usage. Recent…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-26 Xingyu Zhu , Beier Zhu , Shuo Wang , Junfeng Fang , Kesen Zhao , Hanwang Zhang , Xiangnan He

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

Decision analysis deals with modeling and enhancing decision processes. A principal challenge in improving behavior is in obtaining a transparent description of existing behavior in the first place. In this paper, we develop an expressive,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-10-31 Daniel Jarrett , Alihan Hüyük , Mihaela van der Schaar

Activation steering provides parameter-efficient control over large language models (LLMs) at inference time, but many methods rely on off-distribution supervision and discrete masking, leading to brittle interventions. We propose ROAST…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Xuanbo Su , Hao Luo , Yingfang Zhang , Lijun Zhang

Deploying LLMs in real-world applications requires controllable output that satisfies multiple desiderata at the same time. While existing work extensively addresses LLM steering for a single behavior, \textit{compositional steering} --…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Gorjan Radevski , Kiril Gashteovski , Giwon Hong , Carolin Lawrence , Goran Glavaš

Activation steering methods are widely used to control large language model (LLM) behavior and are often interpreted as revealing meaningful internal representations. This interpretation assumes that steering directions are identifiable and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Sohan Venkatesh , Ashish Mahendran Kurapath

Transformer-based language models excel in NLP tasks, but fine-grained control remains challenging. This paper explores methods for manipulating transformer models through principled interventions at three levels: prompts, activations, and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-08 Faruk Alpay , Taylan Alpay

Recent advances in mechanistic interpretability have revealed that large language models (LLMs) develop internal representations corresponding not only to concrete entities but also distinct, human-understandable abstract concepts and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Rio Alexa Fear , Payel Mukhopadhyay , Michael McCabe , Alberto Bietti , Miles Cranmer