Related papers: What Can We Actually Steer? A Multi-Behavior Study…

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…

Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve remarkable performance through pretraining on extensive data. This enables efficient adaptation to diverse downstream tasks. However, the lack of interpretability in their underlying mechanisms limits…

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…

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…

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable success in recent years, enabling a wide range of applications, including intelligent assistants that support users' daily life and work. A critical factor in building such assistants is…

Inference-time LLM alignment methods, particularly activation steering, offer an alternative to fine-tuning by directly modifying activations during generation. Existing methods, however, often rely on non-anticipative interventions that…

Activation steering -- adding a vector to a model's residual stream to modify its behavior -- is widely used in safety evaluations as if the model cannot detect the intervention. We test this assumption, introducing steering awareness: a…

This paper investigates privacy jailbreaking in LLMs via steering, focusing on whether manipulating activations can bypass LLM alignment and alter response behaviors to privacy related queries (e.g., a certain public figure's sexual…

Deploying LLMs in real-world applications requires controllable output that satisfies multiple desiderata at the same time. While existing work extensively addresses LLM steering for a single behavior, \textit{compositional steering} --…

Reflection, the ability of large language models (LLMs) to evaluate and revise their own reasoning, has been widely used to improve performance on complex reasoning tasks. Yet, most prior works emphasizes designing reflective prompting…

Personality steering in large language models (LLMs) commonly relies on injecting trait-specific steering vectors, implicitly assuming that personality traits can be controlled independently. In this work, we examine whether this assumption…

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have led to the development of thinking language models that generate extensive internal reasoning chains before producing responses. While these models achieve improved performance,…

Activation steering methods enable inference-time control of large language model (LLM) behavior without retraining, but current approaches face a fundamental trade-off: sample-efficient methods suboptimally capture steering signals from…

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable capabilities across various tasks, yet guiding them to follow desired behaviours during inference remains a significant challenge. Activation steering offers a promising method to control the…

Steering methods for language models (LMs) have gained traction as lightweight alternatives to fine-tuning, enabling targeted modifications to model activations. However, prior studies primarily report results on a few models, leaving…

Post-training adaptation of language models is commonly achieved through parameter updates or input-based methods such as fine-tuning, parameter-efficient adaptation, and prompting. In parallel, a growing body of work modifies internal…

Large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced dialogue systems and role-playing agents through their ability to generate human-like text. While prior studies have shown that LLMs can exhibit distinct and consistent personalities,…

Activation steering has emerged as a promising approach for efficiently adapting large language models (LLMs) to downstream behaviors. However, most existing steering methods rely on a single static direction per task or concept, making…

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…

As large language models (LLMs) improve in their capacity to serve as personal AI assistants, their ability to output uniquely tailored, personalized responses that align with the soft preferences of their users is essential for enhancing…