English
Related papers

Related papers: Feature-Guided SAE Steering for Refusal-Rate Contr…

200 papers

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have recently gained attention as a means to improve the interpretability and steerability of Large Language Models (LLMs), both of which are essential for AI safety. In this work, we extend the application of…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Mateusz Pach , Shyamgopal Karthik , Quentin Bouniot , Serge Belongie , Zeynep Akata

Large language models (LLMs) can store a significant amount of factual knowledge in their parameters. However, their parametric knowledge may conflict with the information provided in the context -- this phenomenon, known as…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-11 Yu Zhao , Alessio Devoto , Giwon Hong , Xiaotang Du , Aryo Pradipta Gema , Hongru Wang , Xuanli He , Kam-Fai Wong , Pasquale Minervini

As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly integrated into critical applications, aligning their behavior with human values presents significant challenges. Current methods, such as Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Yipeng Kang , Junqi Wang , Yexin Li , Mengmeng Wang , Wenming Tu , Quansen Wang , Hengli Li , Tingjun Wu , Xue Feng , Fangwei Zhong , Zilong Zheng

Large Language Models (LLMs) are machine learning models that have seen widespread adoption due to their capability of handling previously difficult tasks. LLMs, due to their training, are sensitive to how exactly a question is presented,…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-12-22 Jae Yong Lee , Sungmin Kang , Shin Yoo

With the widespread application of Large Language Models (LLMs), it has become a significant concern to ensure their safety and prevent harmful responses. While current safe-alignment methods based on instruction fine-tuning and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-16 Xiaoyun Zhang , Zhengyue Zhao , Wenxuan Shi , Kaidi Xu , Di Huang , Xing Hu

Designing optimal prompts for Large Language Models (LLMs) is a complicated and resource-intensive task, often requiring substantial human expertise and effort. Existing approaches typically separate the optimization of prompt instructions…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-15 Wendi Cui , Zhuohang Li , Hao Sun , Damien Lopez , Kamalika Das , Bradley Malin , Sricharan Kumar , Jiaxin Zhang

Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed natural language processing, yet their internal mechanisms remain largely opaque. Recently, mechanistic interpretability has attracted significant attention from the research community as a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-24 Dong Shu , Xuansheng Wu , Haiyan Zhao , Daking Rai , Ziyu Yao , Ninghao Liu , Mengnan Du

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,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-06 Dianyun Wang , Qingsen Ma , Yuhu Shang , Zhifeng Lu , Zhenbo Xu , Lechen Ning , Huijia Wu , Zhaofeng He

Jailbreak attacks remain a persistent threat to large language model safety. We propose Context-Conditioned Delta Steering (CC-Delta), an SAE-based defense that identifies jailbreak-relevant sparse features by comparing token-level…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-02-16 Yannick Assogba , Jacopo Cortellazzi , Javier Abad , Pau Rodriguez , Xavier Suau , Arno Blaas

Understanding the internal representations of large language models (LLMs) remains a central challenge for interpretability research. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) offer a promising solution by decomposing activations into interpretable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-10 Yifei Yao , Mengnan Du

While large language models (LLMs) are trained to align with human values, their generations may still violate safety constraints. A growing line of work addresses this problem by modifying the model's sampling policy at decoding time using…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Bat-Sheva Einbinder , Hen Davidov , Yee Whye Teh , Yarin Gal , Yaniv Romano

In-context learning, the ability to adapt based on a few examples in the input prompt, is a ubiquitous feature of large language models (LLMs). However, as LLMs' in-context learning abilities continue to improve, understanding this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-03 Can Demircan , Tankred Saanum , Akshay K. Jagadish , Marcel Binz , Eric Schulz

The evaluation of large language models (LLMs) relies heavily on standardized benchmarks. These benchmarks provide useful aggregated metrics for a given capability, but those aggregated metrics can obscure (i) particular sub-areas where the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-25 Matyas Bohacek , Nino Scherrer , Nicholas Dufour , Thomas Leung , Christoph Bregler , Stephanie C. Y. Chan

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is a key paradigm for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values, yet the reward models at its core remain largely opaque. In this work, we present Sparse Autoencoder For…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Wei Shi , Ziyuan Xie , Sihang Li , Xiang Wang

As Large Language Models become integral to software development, with substantial portions of AI-suggested code entering production, understanding their internal correctness mechanisms becomes critical for safe deployment. We apply sparse…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-10-06 Kriz Tahimic , Charibeth Cheng

Large language models (LLMs) are advanced AI systems applied across various domains, including NLP, information retrieval, and recommendation systems. Despite their adaptability and efficiency, LLMs have not been extensively explored for…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Harshith Manjunath , Lucas Heublein , Tobias Feigl , Felix Ott

Large language models (LLMs) show strong multilingual capabilities, yet reliably controlling the language of their outputs remains difficult. Representation-level steering addresses this by adding language-specific vectors to model…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Sing Hieng Wong , Hassan Sajjad , A. B. Siddique

Steering, or direct manipulation of internal activations to guide LLM responses toward specific semantic concepts, is emerging as a promising avenue for both understanding how semantic concepts are stored within LLMs and advancing LLM…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Parmida Davarmanesh , Ashia Wilson , Adityanarayanan Radhakrishnan

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) provide a powerful mechanism for decomposing the dense representations produced by Large Language Models (LLMs) into interpretable latent features. We posit that SAEs constitute a natural foundation for Learned…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Thibault Formal , Maxime Louis , Hervé Dejean , Stéphane Clinchant

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a powerful tool for interpreting large language models (LLMs) by decomposing token activations into combinations of human-understandable features. While SAEs provide crucial insights into LLM…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Zhen Xu , Zhen Tan , Song Wang , Kaidi Xu , Tianlong Chen