Related papers: Steering in the Shadows: Causal Amplification for …
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…
We identify semantically coherent, context-consistent network components in large language models (LLMs) using coactivation of sparse autoencoder (SAE) features collected from just a handful of prompts. Focusing on concept-relation…
Large language models (LLMs) have recently advanced auditory speech recognition (ASR), visual speech recognition (VSR), and audio-visual speech recognition (AVSR). However, understanding of their internal dynamics under fine-tuning remains…
Large Language Models (LLMs), despite advances in instruction tuning, often fail to follow complex user instructions. Activation steering techniques aim to mitigate this by manipulating model internals, but have a potential risk of…
We introduce Contrastive Activation Addition (CAA), an innovative method for steering language models by modifying their activations during forward passes. CAA computes "steering vectors" by averaging the difference in residual stream…
Backdoor attacks creating 'sleeper agents' in large language models (LLMs) pose significant safety risks. This study employs mechanistic interpretability to explore resulting internal structural differences. Comparing clean Qwen2.5-3B…
Activation steering is a popular white-box control technique that modifies model activations to elicit an abstract change in its behavior. It has also become a standard tool in interpretability (e.g., probing truthfulness, or translating…
Large language models (LLMs) can memorize and reproduce training sequences verbatim -- a tendency that undermines both generalization and privacy. Existing mitigation methods apply interventions uniformly, degrading performance on the…
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in settings where inducing a bias toward a certain topic can have significant consequences, and backdoor attacks can be used to produce such models. Prior work on backdoor attacks has…
Large language models (LLMs) have shown great potential in decision-making due to the vast amount of knowledge stored within the models. However, these pre-trained models are prone to lack reasoning abilities and are difficult to adapt to…
Large language models frequently produce errors in reasoning tasks despite possessing the underlying knowledge required for correct reasoning. One possible approach to improve reasoning consistency is through activation steering. However,…
Large language models (LLMs) have significantly influenced various industries but suffer from a critical flaw, the potential sensitivity of generating harmful content, which poses severe societal risks. We developed and tested novel attack…
The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) has marked significant achievements in language processing and reasoning capabilities. Despite their advancements, LLMs face vulnerabilities to data poisoning attacks, where the adversary inserts…
Large language models (LLMs) remain vulnerable to jailbreak prompts that elicit harmful or policy-violating outputs, while many existing defenses rely on expensive fine-tuning, intrusive prompt rewriting, or external guardrails that add…
Vision Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in integrating visual and textual information for understanding and reasoning, but remain highly vulnerable to adversarial attacks. While activation steering has…
As large language models (LLMs) evolve in complexity and capability, the efficacy of less widely deployed alignment techniques are uncertain. Building on previous work on activation steering and contrastive activation addition (CAA), this…
Small Language Models (SLMs) are emerging as efficient and economically viable alternatives to Large Language Models (LLMs), offering competitive performance with significantly lower computational costs and latency. These advantages make…
Large language models (LLMs) are transforming research on machine learning while galvanizing public debates. Understanding not only when these models work well and succeed but also why they fail and misbehave is of great societal relevance.…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful tools, but their inherent safety risks - ranging from harmful content generation to broader societal harms - pose significant challenges. These risks can be amplified by the recent…
Unsupervised approaches to large language model (LLM) interpretability, such as sparse autoencoders (SAEs), offer a way to decode LLM activations into interpretable and, ideally, controllable concepts. On the one hand, these approaches…