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Related papers: Refusal Steering: Fine-grained Control over LLM Re…

200 papers

In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have had great success in tasks such as casual conversation, contributing to significant advancements in domains like virtual assistance. However, they often generate responses that are not…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-11 Ben Ganon , Alon Zolfi , Omer Hofman , Inderjeet Singh , Hisashi Kojima , Yuval Elovici , Asaf Shabtai

Large Language Models' safety-aligned behaviors, such as refusing harmful queries, can be represented by linear directions in activation space. Previous research modeled safety behavior with a single direction, limiting mechanistic…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Wenbo Pan , Zhichao Liu , Qiguang Chen , Xiangyang Zhou , Haining Yu , Xiaohua Jia

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Yang Ouyang , Shuhang Lin , Jung-Eun Kim

Current alignment evaluation mostly measures whether models encode dangerous concepts and whether they refuse harmful requests. Both miss the layer where alignment often operates: routing from concept detection to behavioral policy. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-04 Gregory N. Frank

This work introduces SteerVLM, a lightweight steering module designed to guide Vision-Language Models (VLMs) towards outputs that better adhere to desired instructions. Our approach learns from the latent embeddings of paired prompts…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-10-31 Anushka Sivakumar , Andrew Zhang , Zaber Hakim , Chris Thomas

As the capabilities of Vision Language Models (VLMs) continue to improve, they are increasingly targeted by jailbreak attacks. Existing defense methods face two major limitations: (1) they struggle to ensure safety without compromising the…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Xiyu Zeng , Siyuan Liang , Liming Lu , Haotian Zhu , Enguang Liu , Jisheng Dang , Yongbin Zhou , Shuchao Pang

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

Protecting the intellectual property of large language models (LLMs) is a critical challenge due to the proliferation of unauthorized derivative models. We introduce a novel fingerprinting framework that leverages the behavioral patterns…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Zhenyu Xu , Victor S. Sheng

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have advanced automated multi-step reasoning, but their ability to generate complex Chain-of-Thought (CoT) trajectories introduces severe privacy risks, as sensitive information may be deeply embedded…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-15 Jingjing Zhou , Gaoxiang Cong , Li Su , Liang Li

Responsible deployment of language models requires mechanisms for refusing unsafe prompts while preserving model performance. While most approaches modify model weights through additional training, we explore an alternative: steering model…

In LLM-based text-to-SQL systems, unanswerable and underspecified user queries may generate not only incorrect text but also executable programs that yield misleading results or violate safety constraints, posing a major barrier to safe…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Xuancheng Ren , Shijing Hu , Zhihui Lu , Jiangqi Huang , Qiang Duan

Large language models that require multiple GPU cards to host are usually the most capable models. It is necessary to understand and steer these models, but the current technologies do not support the interpretability and steering of these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-09 Dev Arpan Desai , Shaoyi Huang , Zining Zhu

This study addresses a critical gap in safety tuning practices for Large Language Models (LLMs) by identifying and tackling a refusal position bias within safety tuning data, which compromises the models' ability to appropriately refuse…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-26 Youliang Yuan , Wenxiang Jiao , Wenxuan Wang , Jen-tse Huang , Jiahao Xu , Tian Liang , Pinjia He , Zhaopeng Tu

Large Language Models (LLMs) encode behaviors such as refusal within their activation space, yet identifying these behaviors remains a significant challenge. Existing methods often rely on predefined refusal templates detectable in output…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Vincent Siu , Nicholas Crispino , Zihao Yu , Sam Pan , Zhun Wang , Yang Liu , Dawn Song , Chenguang Wang

Jailbreak attacks pose persistent threats to large language models (LLMs). Current safety alignment methods have attempted to address these issues, but they experience two significant limitations: insufficient safety alignment depth and…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-09-19 Yuanbo Xie , Yingjie Zhang , Tianyun Liu , Duohe Ma , Tingwen Liu

For Large Language Models (LLMs) to be reliably deployed, models must effectively know when not to answer: abstain. Reasoning models, in particular, have gained attention for impressive performance on complex tasks. However, reasoning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-03 Abinitha Gourabathina , Inkit Padhi , Manish Nagireddy , Subhajit Chaudhury , Prasanna Sattigeri

Applying steering vectors to large language models (LLMs) is an efficient and effective model alignment technique, but we lack an interpretable explanation for how it works-- specifically, what internal mechanisms steering vectors affect…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-10 Stephen Cheng , Sarah Wiegreffe , Dinesh Manocha

Large language models (LLMs) frequently produce false refusals, declining benign requests that contain terms resembling unsafe queries. We address this challenge by introducing two comprehensive benchmarks: the Exaggerated Safety Benchmark…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-19 Shuzhou Yuan , Ercong Nie , Yinuo Sun , Chenxuan Zhao , William LaCroix , Michael Färber

Safety alignment is indispensable for Large Language Models (LLMs) to defend threats from malicious instructions. However, recent researches reveal safety-aligned LLMs prone to reject benign queries due to the exaggerated safety issue,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-12-18 Zouying Cao , Yifei Yang , Hai Zhao

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Xintong Wang , Jingheng Pan , Liang Ding , Longyue Wang , Longqin Jiang , Xingshan Li , Chris Biemann