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Large language models (LLMs), despite being safety-aligned, exhibit brittle refusal behaviors that can be circumvented by simple linguistic changes. As tense jailbreaking demonstrates that models refusing harmful requests often comply when…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Yein Park , Jungwoo Park , Jaewoo Kang

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit reasoning biases, often conflating content plausibility with formal logical validity. This can lead to wrong inferences in critical domains, where plausible arguments are incorrectly deemed logically…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Marco Valentino , Geonhee Kim , Dhairya Dalal , Zhixue Zhao , André Freitas

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly exhibit behaviors suggesting awareness of their evaluation context, often adapting their reasoning strategies in benchmark settings. Prior work has shown that such evaluation awareness can distort…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Yanshi Li , Xueru Bai , Shuman Liu , Haibo Zhang , Anxiang Zeng

Safety alignment mechanisms in Large Language Models (LLMs) often operate as latent internal states, obscuring the model's inherent capabilities. Building on this observation, we model the safety mechanism as an unobserved confounder from a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-09 Yao Zhou , Zeen Song , Wenwen Qiang , Fengge Wu , Shuyi Zhou , Changwen Zheng , Hui Xiong

Activation steering is a method for controlling Large Language Model (LLM) behavior by intervening in its internal representations to increase the alignment with a specific target feature direction. However, standard interventions, such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Tam Nguyen , Tu Anh Nguyen , Sina Alemohammad , Richard G. Baraniuk

Alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs) is the ability to satisfy desired objectives during generation, which is critical for trustworthy deployment. In practice, alignment is often operationalized through multiple objectives such as…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Gautam Siddharth Kashyap , Mark Dras , Usman Naseem

Altruism is fundamental to human societies, fostering cooperation and social cohesion. Recent studies suggest that large language models (LLMs) can display human-like prosocial behavior, but the internal computations that produce such…

General Economics · Economics 2026-04-22 Shuhuai Zhang , Shu Wang , Zijun Yao , Chuanhao Li , Xiaozhi Wang , Songfa Zhong , Tracy Xiao Liu

Activation steering methods control large language model (LLM) behavior by modifying internal activations at inference time. However, most existing activation steering methods rely on a fixed steering strength, leading to either…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-16 Arthur Vogels , Benjamin Wong , Yann Choho , Annabelle Blangero , Milan Bhan

Code LLMs often default to particular programming languages and libraries under neutral prompts. We investigate whether these preferences are encoded as approximately linear directions in activation space that can be manipulated at…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-30 Md Mahbubur Rahman , Arjun Guha , Harshitha Menon

Controlling undesirable Large Language Model (LLM) behaviors, such as the generation of unsafe content or failing to adhere to safety guidelines, often relies on costly fine-tuning. Activation steering provides an alternative for…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Amr Hegazy , Mostafa Elhoushi , Amr Alanwar

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has improved the reasoning performance of large language models (LLMs), but it remains unclear why it works and whether it is the unique mechanism for triggering reasoning in large language models. In this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Zhenghao He , Guangzhi Xiong , Bohan Liu , Sanchit Sinha , Aidong Zhang

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

The memorization of training data by Large Language Models (LLMs) poses significant risks, including privacy leaks and the regurgitation of copyrighted content. Activation steering, a technique that directly intervenes in model activations,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-11 Manan Suri , Nishit Anand , Amisha Bhaskar

Automated essay scoring (AES) is a challenging task in cross-prompt settings due to the diversity of scoring criteria. While previous studies have focused on the output of large language models (LLMs) to improve scoring accuracy, we believe…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Jinwei Chi , Ke Wang , Yu Chen , Xuanye Lin , Qiang Xu

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly becoming the preferred foundation platforms for many Natural Language Processing tasks such as Machine Translation, owing to their quality often comparable to or better than task-specific…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-18 Zhifan Sun , Antonio Valerio Miceli-Barone

Large language models (LLMs) excel at complex reasoning when they include intermediate steps, known as "chains of thought" (CoTs). However, these rationales are often overly verbose, even for simple problems, leading to wasted context,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-07-09 Seyedarmin Azizi , Erfan Baghaei Potraghloo , Massoud Pedram

Recent advances in automated theorem proving use Large Language Models (LLMs) to translate informal mathematical statements into formal proofs. However, informal cues are often ambiguous or lack strict logical structure, making it hard for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Shashank Kirtania , Arun Iyer

Adversarial attacks against Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) are crucial for exposing safety vulnerabilities in modern multimodal systems. Recent attacks based on input transformations, such as random cropping, suggest that spatially…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-02-05 Jaehyun Kwak , Nam Cao , Boryeong Cho , Segyu Lee , Sumyeong Ahn , Se-Young Yun

Software vulnerabilities are a primary threat to modern infrastructure. While static analysis and Graph Neural Networks have long served as the foundation for vulnerability detection, the emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) has…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-04-22 Zhengyang Shan , Xu Qian , Jiayun Xin , Minghui Xu , Yue Zhang , Zhen Yang , Hao Wu , Xiuzhen Cheng

As the development and application of Large Language Models (LLMs) continue to advance rapidly, enhancing their trustworthiness and aligning them with human preferences has become a critical area of research. Traditional methods rely…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-06 Yuxin Xiao , Chaoqun Wan , Yonggang Zhang , Wenxiao Wang , Binbin Lin , Xiaofei He , Xu Shen , Jieping Ye