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Activation steering methods in large language models (LLMs) have emerged as an effective way to perform targeted updates to enhance generated language without requiring large amounts of adaptation data. We ask whether the features…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-05 Masha Fedzechkina , Eleonora Gualdoni , Sinead Williamson , Katherine Metcalf , Skyler Seto , Barry-John Theobald

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,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-18 Shu Yang , Shenzhe Zhu , Liang Liu , Lijie Hu , Mengdi Li , Di Wang

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a promising approach for uncovering interpretable features in large language models (LLMs). While several automated evaluation methods exist for SAEs, most rely on external LLMs. In this work, we introduce…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Alex Gulko , Yusen Peng , Sachin Kumar

Researchers have been studying approaches to steer the behavior of Large Language Models (LLMs) and build personalized LLMs tailored for various applications. While fine-tuning seems to be a direct solution, it requires substantial…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-31 Yuanpu Cao , Tianrong Zhang , Bochuan Cao , Ziyi Yin , Lu Lin , Fenglong Ma , Jinghui Chen

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a popular tool for interpreting the hidden states of large language models (LLMs). By learning to reconstruct activations from a sparse bottleneck layer, SAEs discover interpretable features from…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-09-19 Matthew Lyle Olson , Musashi Hinck , Neale Ratzlaff , Changbai Li , Phillip Howard , Vasudev Lal , Shao-Yen Tseng

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have become a central tool for interpreting language models. However, two key SAE analyses that remain difficult to scale are (1) matching semantically similar features across multi-layers and (2) compressing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Tue M. Cao , Nguyen Do , My T. Thai

Existing behavioral alignment techniques for Large Language Models (LLMs) often neglect the discrepancy between surface compliance and internal unaligned representations, leaving LLMs vulnerable to long-tail risks. More crucially, we posit…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Lingyu Li , Yan Teng , Yingchun Wang

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in generating human-like text, but their output may not be aligned with the user or even produce harmful content. This paper presents a novel approach to detect and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-06 Ruben Härle , Felix Friedrich , Manuel Brack , Björn Deiseroth , Patrick Schramowski , Kristian Kersting

We consider the problem of accurate sparse fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs), that is, fine-tuning pretrained LLMs on specialized tasks, while inducing sparsity in their weights. On the accuracy side, we observe that standard…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-16 Eldar Kurtic , Denis Kuznedelev , Elias Frantar , Michael Goin , Dan Alistarh

Fine-grained steering of language model outputs is essential for safety and reliability. Prompting and finetuning are widely used to achieve these goals, but interpretability researchers have proposed a variety of representation-based…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-05 Zhengxuan Wu , Aryaman Arora , Atticus Geiger , Zheng Wang , Jing Huang , Dan Jurafsky , Christopher D. Manning , Christopher Potts

Large language models possess strong chemical reasoning capabilities, making them effective molecular editors. However, property-relevant information is implicitly entangled across their dense hidden states, providing no explicit handle for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Mingxu Zhang , Yuhan Li , Lujundong Li , Dazhong Shen , Hui Xiong , Ying Sun

Mechanistic interpretability has revealed how concepts are encoded in large language models (LLMs), but emotional content remains poorly understood at the mechanistic level. We study whether LLMs process emotional valence through dedicated…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Sohan Venkatesh

Can large language models introspect, that is, accurately detect perturbations to their own internal states? We systematically investigate this question using activation steering in Meta-Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct. First, we show that the binary…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Ely Hahami , Ishaan Sinha , Lavik Jain , Josh Kaplan , Jon Hahami

Refusal is a key safety behavior in aligned language models, yet the internal mechanisms driving refusals remain opaque. In this work, we conduct a mechanistic study of refusal in instruction-tuned LLMs using sparse autoencoders to identify…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Wei Jie Yeo , Nirmalendu Prakash , Clement Neo , Roy Ka-Wei Lee , Erik Cambria , Ranjan Satapathy

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have recently emerged as a powerful tool for interpreting the internal representations of large language models (LLMs), revealing latent latent features with semantical meaning. This interpretability has also…

Other Quantitative Biology · Quantitative Biology 2025-07-11 Haoxiang Guan , Jiyan He , Jie Zhang

Steering has emerged as a promising approach in controlling large language models (LLMs) without modifying model parameters. However, most existing steering methods rely on large-scale datasets to learn clear behavioral information, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-06 Anyi Wang , Xuansheng Wu , Dong Shu , Yunpu Ma , Ninghao Liu

Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely deployed in real-world applications, yet their internal mechanisms remain difficult to interpret and control, limiting our ability to diagnose and correct undesirable behaviors. Mechanistic…

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-08-13 Shivam Dubey

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) aim to decompose the activation space of large language models (LLMs) into human-interpretable latent directions or features. As we increase the number of features in the SAE, hierarchical features tend to split…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-18 David Chanin , James Wilken-Smith , Tomáš Dulka , Hardik Bhatnagar , Satvik Golechha , Joseph Bloom

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit distinct and consistent personalities that greatly impact trust and engagement. While this means that personality frameworks would be highly valuable tools to characterize and control LLMs' behavior,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-19 Michel Frising , Daniel Balcells