Related papers: Depth-Wise Activation Steering for Honest Language…

Activation engineering is becoming increasingly popular as a means of online control of large language models (LLMs). In this work, we extend the idea of inference-time steering with vectors that represent a behavioral direction of interest…

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…

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate strong chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning abilities, while smaller models (<= 3B parameters) significantly underperform on multi-step reasoning tasks. Based on empirical analyses of the Qwen-2.5 model…

Activation sparsity can enable practical inference speedups in large language models (LLMs) by reducing the compute and memory-movement required for matrix multiplications during the forward pass. However, existing methods face limitations…

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…

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting has been extended to large audio-language models (LALMs) to elicit reasoning, yet enhancing its effectiveness without training remains challenging. We study inference-time model steering as a training-free…

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…

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance across many generation tasks. Nevertheless, effectively aligning them with desired behaviors remains a significant challenge. Activation steering is an effective and…

We propose a method for confidence estimation in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems that aligns closely with the correctness of large language model (LLM) outputs. Confidence estimation is especially critical in high-stakes…

Recent studies have indicated that Large Language Models (LLMs) harbor an inherent understanding of truthfulness, yet often fail to consistently express it and generate false statements. This gap between "knowing" and "telling" poses a…

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across vision-language tasks, yet their large-scale deployment raises pressing concerns about memorized private data, outdated knowledge, and harmful…

Language models (LMs) are typically post-trained for desired capabilities and behaviors via weight-based or prompt-based steering, but the former is time-consuming and expensive, and the latter is not precisely controllable and often…

Large language models (LLMs) are prone to capturing biases from training corpus, leading to potential negative social impacts. Existing prompt-based debiasing methods exhibit instability due to their sensitivity to prompt changes, while…

Inference-time steering offers a promising way to control language models (LMs) without retraining. However, standard approaches typically rely on activation addition, which inevitably alters the hidden-state magnitudes raising concerns…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success across various industries due to their exceptional generative capabilities. However, for safe and effective real-world deployments, ensuring honesty and helpfulness is critical.…

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) become more capable and agentic, the requirement for trust in their outputs grows significantly, yet at the same time concerns have been mounting that models may learn to lie in pursuit of their goals. To…

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…

Effective and reliable control over large language model (LLM) behavior is a significant challenge. While activation steering methods, which add steering vectors to a model's hidden states, are a promising approach, existing techniques…

Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human values and away from undesirable behaviors (such as hallucination) has become increasingly important. Recently, steering LLMs towards a desired behavior via activation editing has emerged as…