English
Related papers

Related papers: Steering in the Shadows: Causal Amplification for …

200 papers

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Reza Bayat , Ali Rahimi-Kalahroudi , Mohammad Pezeshki , Sarath Chandar , Pascal Vincent

Large language models (LLMs) are now ubiquitous in user-facing applications, yet they still generate undesirable toxic outputs, including profanity, vulgarity, and derogatory remarks. Although numerous detoxification methods exist, most…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Agam Goyal , Vedant Rathi , William Yeh , Yian Wang , Yuen Chen , Hari Sundaram

Activation steering is a practical post-training model alignment technique to enhance the utility of Large Language Models (LLMs). Prior to deploying a model as a service, developers can steer a pre-trained model toward specific behavioral…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Chen Xiong , Zhiyuan He , Pin-Yu Chen , Ching-Yun Ko , Tsung-Yi Ho

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

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in natural language understanding and generation, but controlling their behavior reliably remains challenging, especially in open-ended generation settings. This paper…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-08 Zirui He , Mingyu Jin , Bo Shen , Ali Payani , Yongfeng Zhang , Mengnan Du

Safety alignment is indispensable for Large Language Models (LLMs) to defend threats from malicious instructions. However, recent researches reveal safety-aligned LLMs prone to reject benign queries due to the exaggerated safety issue,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-12-18 Zouying Cao , Yifei Yang , Hai Zhao

Activation-based steering enables Large Language Models (LLMs) to exhibit targeted behaviors by intervening on intermediate activations without retraining. Despite its widespread use, the mechanistic factors that govern when steering…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-13 Mehdi Jafari , Hao Xue , Flora Salim

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

Large language models (LLMs) often encode cognitive behaviors unpredictably across prompts, layers, and contexts, making them difficult to diagnose and control. We present CBMAS, a diagnostic framework for continuous activation steering,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Ahmed H. Ismail , Anthony Kuang , Ayo Akinkugbe , Kevin Zhu , Sean O'Brien

Activation steering is a promising technique for controlling LLM behavior by adding semantically meaningful vectors directly into a model's hidden states during inference. It is often framed as a precise, interpretable, and potentially…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Anton Korznikov , Andrey Galichin , Alexey Dontsov , Oleg Y. Rogov , Ivan Oseledets , Elena Tutubalina

Recent developments in Large Language Model (LLM) capabilities have brought great potential but also posed new risks. For example, LLMs with knowledge of bioweapons, advanced chemistry, or cyberattacks could cause violence if placed in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-17 Matthew Khoriaty , Andrii Shportko , Gustavo Mercier , Zach Wood-Doughty

Large language models (LLMs) can be controlled at inference time through prompts (in-context learning) and internal activations (activation steering). Different accounts have been proposed to explain these methods, yet their common goal of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-13 Eric Bigelow , Daniel Wurgaft , YingQiao Wang , Noah Goodman , Tomer Ullman , Hidenori Tanaka , Ekdeep Singh Lubana

To ensure AI safety, instruction-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) are specifically trained to ensure alignment, which refers to making models behave in accordance with human intentions. While these models have demonstrated commendable…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-08-19 Haoran Wang , Kai Shu

Linear activation steering is a powerful approach for eliciting the capabilities of large language models and specializing their behavior using limited labeled data. While effective, existing methods often apply a fixed steering strength to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Brandon Hsu , Daniel Beaglehole , Adityanarayanan Radhakrishnan , Mikhail Belkin

Controlling the behavior of Large Language Models (LLMs) remains a significant challenge due to their inherent complexity and opacity. While techniques like fine-tuning can modify model behavior, they typically require extensive…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-07 Yixiong Hao , Ayush Panda , Stepan Shabalin , Sheikh Abdur Raheem Ali

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…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Rui Yin , Tianxu Han , Naen Xu , Changjiang Li , Ping He , Chunyi Zhou , Jun Wang , Zhihui Fu , Tianyu Du , Jinbao Li , Shouling Ji

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

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

Large language models (LLMs) excel at handling human queries, but they can occasionally generate flawed or unexpected responses. Understanding their internal states is crucial for understanding their successes, diagnosing their failures,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-24 Xuansheng Wu , Jiayi Yuan , Wenlin Yao , Xiaoming Zhai , Ninghao Liu

Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with specific personas typically relies on expensive and monolithic Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) or RLHF. While effective, these methods require training distinct models for every target personality…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Florian Hoppe , David Khachaturov , Robert Mullins , Mark Huasong Meng
‹ Prev 1 2 3 10 Next ›