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Large language models have transformed AI, yet reliably controlling their outputs remains a challenge. This paper explores activation engineering, where outputs of pre-trained LLMs are controlled by manipulating their activations at…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2025-05-13 Joris Postmus , Steven Abreu

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit impressive capabilities in generation tasks but are prone to producing harmful, misleading, or biased content, posing significant ethical and safety concerns. To mitigate such risks, representation…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-11-17 Zeqing He , Zhibo Wang , Huiyu Xu , Hejun Lin , Wenhui Zhang , Zhixuan Chu

Pragmatic inference is inherently graded. Different lexical items give rise to pragmatic enrichment to different degrees. Scalar implicature exemplifies this property through scalar diversity, where implicature strength varies across scalar…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-09 Ye-eun Cho

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) exhibit outstanding performance on vision-language tasks but struggle with hallucination problems. Through in-depth analysis of LVLM activation patterns, we reveal two key findings: 1) truthfulness and…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-02-26 Jianghao Yin , Qin Chen , Kedi Chen , Jie Zhou , Xingjiao Wu , Liang He

Large Language Models (LLMs), despite advanced general capabilities, still suffer from numerous safety risks, especially jailbreak attacks that bypass safety protocols. Understanding these vulnerabilities through black-box jailbreak…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Yao Huang , Yitong Sun , Shouwei Ruan , Yichi Zhang , Yinpeng Dong , Xingxing Wei

Controlling the behavior of large language models (LLMs) at inference time is essential for aligning outputs with human abilities and safety requirements. \emph{Activation steering} provides a lightweight alternative to prompt engineering…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Diaoulé Diallo , Katharina Dworatzyk , Sophie Jentzsch , Peer Schütt , Sabine Theis , Tobias Hecking

Safety alignment is a key requirement for building reliable Artificial General Intelligence. Despite significant advances in safety alignment, we observe that minor latent shifts can still trigger unsafe responses in aligned models. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-23 Tianle Gu , Kexin Huang , Zongqi Wang , Yixu Wang , Jie Li , Yuanqi Yao , Yang Yao , Yujiu Yang , Yan Teng , Yingchun Wang

Large language models (LLMs) have made remarkable strides in complex reasoning tasks, but their safety and robustness in reasoning processes remain underexplored. Existing attacks on LLM reasoning are constrained by specific settings or…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Jingyu Peng , Maolin Wang , Xiangyu Zhao , Kai Zhang , Wanyu Wang , Pengyue Jia , Qidong Liu , Ruocheng Guo , Qi Liu

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

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have intensified the need to understand and reliably curb their harmful behaviours. We introduce a multidimensional framework for probing and steering harmful content in model internals. For…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-07-30 McNair Shah , Saleena Angeline , Adhitya Rajendra Kumar , Naitik Chheda , Kevin Zhu , Vasu Sharma , Sean O'Brien , Will Cai

Activation-based control steers large language models (LLMs) by intervening on their internal representations during inference, and has emerged as an effective paradigm for controlling behaviors such as persona and style. However, existing…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Yingdong Shi , Ruiming Zhang , Changming Li , Zhiyu Yang , Kaixing Zhang , Jingyi Yu , Kan Ren

The ability of large language models (LLMs) to follow instructions is crucial for their practical applications, yet the underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. This paper presents a novel framework that leverages sparse autoencoders…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-18 Zirui He , Haiyan Zhao , Yiran Qiao , Fan Yang , Ali Payani , Jing Ma , Mengnan Du

This paper investigates how Large Language Models (LLMs) represent non-English tokens -- a question that remains underexplored despite recent progress. We propose a lightweight intervention method using representation steering, where a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-27 Omar Mahmoud , Buddhika Laknath Semage , Thommen George Karimpanal , Santu Rana

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate increasing conversational fluency, yet instilling them with nuanced, human-like emotional expression remains a significant challenge. Current alignment techniques often address surface-level output…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Niranjan Chebrolu , Gerard Christopher Yeo , Kokil Jaidka

Embodied Large Language Models (LLMs) enable AI agents to interact with the physical world through natural language instructions and actions. However, beyond the language-level risks inherent to LLMs themselves, embodied LLMs with…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Xinyu Huang , Qiang Yang , Leming Shen , Zijing Ma , Yuanqing Zheng

Large language models (LLMs) require precise behavior control for safe and effective deployment across diverse applications. Activation steering offers a promising approach for LLMs' behavioral control. We focus on the question of how…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Tetiana Bas , Krystian Novak

In this study, we address the challenge of enabling large language models (LLMs) to consistently adhere to emotional support strategies in extended conversations. We focus on the steerability of the Llama-2 and Llama-3 suite of models,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-17 Navid Madani , Sougata Saha , Rohini Srihari

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) often exhibit significant modality preference, which is a tendency to favor one modality over another. Depending on the input, they may over-rely on linguistic priors relative to visual evidence, or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-16 Zihan Huang , Xintong Li , Rohan Surana , Tong Yu , Rui Wang , Julian McAuley , Jingbo Shang , Junda Wu

The recent surge in jailbreaking attacks has revealed significant vulnerabilities in Large Language Models (LLMs) when exposed to malicious inputs. While various defense strategies have been proposed to mitigate these threats, there has…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-24 Tianlong Li , Zhenghua Wang , Wenhao Liu , Muling Wu , Shihan Dou , Changze Lv , Xiaohua Wang , Xiaoqing Zheng , Xuanjing Huang

Large Language Models (LLMs) encode vast amounts of parametric knowledge during pre-training. As world knowledge evolves, effective deployment increasingly depends on their ability to faithfully follow externally retrieved context. When…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Nikhil Anand , Shwetha Somasundaram , Anirudh Phukan , Apoorv Saxena , Koyel Mukherjee