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Related papers: Steering Language Models with Weight Arithmetic

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We present a novel retrofitting method to induce emotion aspects into pre-trained language models (PLMs) such as BERT and RoBERTa. Our method updates pre-trained network weights using contrastive learning so that the text fragments…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Sapan Shah , Sreedhar Reddy , Pushpak Bhattacharyya

Current evaluations of Large Language Model (LLM) steering techniques focus on task-specific performance, overlooking how well steered representations align with human cognition. Using a well-established triadic similarity judgment task, we…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Zach Studdiford , Timothy T. Rogers , Siddharth Suresh , Kushin Mukherjee

Controlling stylistic attributes in large language models (LLMs) remains challenging, with existing approaches relying on either prompt engineering or post-training alignment. This paper investigates this challenge through the lens of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Zhenyu Xu , Victor S. Sheng

We present a novel approach to bias mitigation in large language models (LLMs) by applying steering vectors to modify model activations in forward passes. We compute 8 steering vectors, each corresponding to a different social bias axis,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Zara Siddique , Irtaza Khalid , Liam D. Turner , Luis Espinosa-Anke

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive performance in natural language tasks, but their outputs can exhibit undesirable attributes or biases. Existing methods for steering LLMs toward desired attributes often assume unbiased…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-05 Zhixuan Chu , Yan Wang , Longfei Li , Zhibo Wang , Zhan Qin , Kui Ren

Robust alignment guardrails for large language models (LLMs) are becoming increasingly important with their widespread application. In contrast to previous studies, we demonstrate that inference-time activation interventions can bypass…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-26 Paul Darm , Annalisa Riccardi

Language models often struggle with temporal misalignment, performance degradation caused by shifts in the temporal distribution of data. Continuously updating models to avoid degradation is expensive. Can models be adapted without updating…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-26 Changho Shin , Xinya Yan , Suenggwan Jo , Sungjun Cho , Shourjo Aditya Chaudhuri , Frederic Sala

Large Language Models (LLMs) suffer from huge number of parameters, which restricts their deployment on edge devices. Weight sharing is one promising solution that encourages weight reuse, effectively reducing memory usage with less…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-25 Zouying Cao , Yifei Yang , Hai Zhao

In this work, we present a simple yet theoretically motivated improvement to Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) for the Large Language Model (LLM), addressing its limited generalization compared to reinforcement learning (RL). Through…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Yongliang Wu , Yizhou Zhou , Zhou Ziheng , Yingzhe Peng , Xinyu Ye , Xinting Hu , Wenbo Zhu , Lu Qi , Ming-Hsuan Yang , Xu Yang

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being used in educational and learning applications. Research has demonstrated that controlling for style, to fit the needs of the learner, fosters increased understanding, promotes inclusion,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-19 Ankit Aich , Tingting Liu , Salvatore Giorgi , Kelsey Isman , Lyle Ungar , Brenda Curtis

Manipulating data, such as weighting data examples or augmenting with new instances, has been increasingly used to improve model training. Previous work has studied various rule- or learning-based approaches designed for specific types of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-29 Zhiting Hu , Bowen Tan , Ruslan Salakhutdinov , Tom Mitchell , Eric P. Xing

Data selection for finetuning Large Language Models (LLMs) can be framed as a budget-constrained optimization problem: maximizing a model's downstream performance under a strict training data budget. Solving this problem is generally…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-01 Animesh Jha , Harshit Gupta , Ananjan Nandi

Explorations in fine-tuning Vision-Language Models (VLMs), such as Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) from Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT), have made impressive progress. However, most approaches rely on explicit weight updates, overlooking…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-30 Mingyuan Zhang , Yue Bai , Yifan Wang , Yiyang Huang , Yun Fu

Finetuning a pretrained model has become a standard approach for training neural networks on novel tasks, resulting in fast convergence and improved performance. In this work, we study an alternative finetuning method, where instead of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-04 Gal Kaplun , Andrey Gurevich , Tal Swisa , Mazor David , Shai Shalev-Shwartz , Eran Malach

Large language models (LLMs) tend to verbalize confidence scores that are largely detached from their actual accuracy, yet the geometric relationship governing this behavior remain poorly understood. In this work, we present a mechanistic…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Miranda Muqing Miao , Lyle Ungar

We introduce Mechanistic Error Reduction with Abstention (MERA), a principled framework for steering language models (LMs) to mitigate errors through selective, adaptive interventions. Unlike existing methods that rely on fixed, manually…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-16 Anna Hedström , Salim I. Amoukou , Tom Bewley , Saumitra Mishra , Manuela Veloso

Self-improvement through post-training methods such as iterative preference learning has been acclaimed for enhancing the problem-solving capabilities (e.g., mathematical reasoning) of Large Language Models (LLMs) without human…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-09 Ting Wu , Xuefeng Li , Pengfei Liu

With the rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs), their deployment in real-world applications has become increasingly widespread. LLMs are expected to deliver robust performance across diverse tasks, user preferences, and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-21 Wei Xia , Zhi-Hong Deng

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) of large language models can be viewed as an off-policy learning problem, where expert demonstrations come from a fixed behavior policy while training aims to optimize a target policy. Importance sampling is the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Shiwan Zhao , Xuyang Zhao , Jiaming Zhou , Aobo Kong , Qicheng Li , Yong Qin

While large language models (LLMs) often adopt finetuning to unlock their capabilities for downstream applications, our understanding on the inductive biases (especially the scaling properties) of different finetuning methods is still…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-28 Biao Zhang , Zhongtao Liu , Colin Cherry , Orhan Firat