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Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are a promising path to realizing generalist embodied agents that can quickly adapt to new tasks, modalities, and environments. However, methods for interpreting and steering VLAs fall far short of…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Bear Häon , Kaylene Stocking , Ian Chuang , Claire Tomlin

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Weixuan Wang , Minghao Wu , Barry Haddow , Alexandra Birch

Interventions in language models (LMs) are applied strategically to steer model behavior during the forward pass. Learnable interventions, also known as representation fine-tuning, aim to apply pointwise control within the concept subspace…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Chunyuan Deng , Ruidi Chang , Hanjie Chen

As large language models (LLMs) see greater use in academic and commercial settings, there is increasing interest in methods that allow language models to generate texts aligned with human preferences. In this paper, we present an initial…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-07 Victoria Lin , Eli Ben-Michael , Louis-Philippe Morency

We address the challenge of societal bias in Large Language Models (LLMs), focusing on the Llama 2 7B Chat model. As LLMs are increasingly integrated into decision-making processes with substantial societal impact, it becomes imperative to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-02 Dawn Lu , Nina Rimsky

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in complex reasoning and text generation. However, these models can inadvertently generate unsafe or biased responses when prompted with problematic inputs, raising…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-03 Avinash Amballa , Durga Sandeep Saluru , Gayathri Akkinapalli , Abhishek Sureddy , Akshay Kumar Sureddy

The rapid advancement of Vision-Language models (VLMs) has raised growing concerns that their black-box reasoning processes could lead to unintended forms of social bias. Current debiasing approaches focus on mitigating surface-level bias…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Na Min An , Yoonna Jang , Yusuke Hirota , Ryo Hachiuma , Isabelle Augenstein , Hyunjung Shim

Iterative self-improvement, a concept extending beyond personal growth, has found powerful applications in machine learning, particularly in transforming weak models into strong ones. While recent advances in natural language processing…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-01-09 Daechul Ahn , Yura Choi , San Kim , Youngjae Yu , Dongyeop Kang , Jonghyun Choi

The role of reinforcement learning (RL) in enhancing the reasoning of large language models (LLMs) is becoming increasingly significant. Despite the success of RL in many scenarios, there are still many challenges in improving the reasoning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-12-25 Jiacai Liu , Chaojie Wang , Chris Yuhao Liu , Liang Zeng , Rui Yan , Yiwen Sun , Yang Liu , Yahui Zhou

While advances in fairness and alignment have helped mitigate overt biases exhibited by large language models (LLMs) when explicitly prompted, we hypothesize that these models may still exhibit implicit biases when simulating human…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-30 Yuxuan Li , Hirokazu Shirado , Sauvik Das

We introduce Mechanistic Error Reduction with Abstention (MERA), a principled framework for steering language models (LMs) to mitigate errors through selective, adaptive interventions. Unlike existing methods that rely on fixed, manually…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-16 Anna Hedström , Salim I. Amoukou , Tom Bewley , Saumitra Mishra , Manuela Veloso

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has become a widely used training method for the instruction fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs). In this work, we explore an under-investigated aspect of DPO - its dependency on the reference…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-23 Yixin Liu , Pengfei Liu , Arman Cohan

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…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2025-05-15 Jessica Y. Bo , Tianyu Xu , Ishan Chatterjee , Katrina Passarella-Ward , Achin Kulshrestha , D Shin

While open sourced Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have proliferated, selecting the optimal pretrained model for a specific downstream task remains challenging. Exhaustive evaluation is often infeasible due to computational constraints and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Wei Yang , Hong Xie , Tao Tan , Xin Li , Defu Lian , Enhong Chen

Having an LLM that aligns with human preferences is essential for accommodating individual needs, such as maintaining writing style or generating specific topics of interest. The majority of current alignment methods rely on fine-tuning or…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-06 Bingqing Song , Boran Han , Shuai Zhang , Hao Wang , Haoyang Fang , Bonan Min , Yuyang Wang , Mingyi Hong

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to generate multiple-choice questions (MCQs), where correct answers should ideally be uniformly distributed across options. However, we observe that LLMs exhibit systematic position biases…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Xuemei Tang , Xufeng Duan , Zhenguang G. Cai

Subliminal learning describes a student language model inheriting a behavioral bias by fine-tuning on seemingly innocuous data generated by a biased teacher model. Prior work has begun to characterize this phenomenon but leaves open…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-29 George Morgulis , John Hewitt

Vision Language Models (VLMs) achieve strong performance on multimodal tasks but still suffer from hallucination and safety-related failures that persist even at scale. Steering offers a lightweight technique to improve model performance.…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Youxu Shi , Suorong Yang , Dong Liu

While large language models (LLMs) have seen unprecedented advancements in capabilities and applications across a variety of use-cases, safety alignment of these models is still an area of active research. The fragile nature of LLMs, even…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-03 Amrita Bhattacharjee , Shaona Ghosh , Traian Rebedea , Christopher Parisien

Controlling the behaviors of large language models (LLM) is fundamental to their safety alignment and reliable deployment. However, existing steering methods are primarily driven by empirical insights and lack theoretical performance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Dung V. Nguyen , Hieu M. Vu , Nhi Y. Pham , Lei Zhang , Tan M. Nguyen