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Detecting cognitive biases in large language models (LLMs) is a fascinating task that aims to probe the existing cognitive biases within these models. Current methods for detecting cognitive biases in language models generally suffer from…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-08 Zhentao Xie , Jiabao Zhao , Yilei Wang , Jinxin Shi , Yanhong Bai , Xingjiao Wu , Liang He

Large Language Models (LLMs) often rely on long chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning to solve complex tasks. While effective, these trajectories are frequently inefficient, leading to high latency from excessive token generation, or unstable…

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

LLMs have shown remarkable capabilities, but precisely controlling their response behavior remains challenging. Existing activation steering methods alter LLM behavior indiscriminately, limiting their practical applicability in settings…

While Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have achieved remarkable performance by scaling test-time compute, they frequently suffer from Cognitive Inertia, a failure pattern manifesting as either overthinking (inertia of motion) or reasoning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Seojin Lee , ByeongJeong Kim , Hwanhee Lee

Large Language Models (LLMs) often exhibit homogenized cultural perspectives. While the World Values Survey (WVS) provides a gold standard for mapping human values, traditional direct prompting of LLMs on WVS often fails to access the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Trung Duc Anh Dang , Sarah Masud

Model steering represents a powerful technique that dynamically aligns large language models (LLMs) with human preferences during inference. However, conventional model-steering methods rely heavily on externally annotated data, not only…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-15 Rongyi Zhu , Yuhui Wang , Tanqiu Jiang , Jiacheng Liang , Ting Wang

Where should we intervene in a language model (LM) to localize and control behaviors that are diffused across many tokens of a long-form response? We introduce Generative Causal Mediation (GCM), a procedure for selecting model components…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Aruna Sankaranarayanan , Amir Zur , Atticus Geiger , Dylan Hadfield-Menell

Activation steering is a popular white-box control technique that modifies model activations to elicit an abstract change in its behavior. It has also become a standard tool in interpretability (e.g., probing truthfulness, or translating…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Aayush Mishra , Daniel Khashabi , Anqi Liu

We present a novel approach to bias mitigation in large language models (LLMs) by applying steering vectors to modify model activations in forward passes. We compute 8 steering vectors, each corresponding to a different social bias axis,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Zara Siddique , Irtaza Khalid , Liam D. Turner , Luis Espinosa-Anke

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities across a wide range of natural language processing tasks. However, their outputs often exhibit social biases, raising fairness concerns. Existing debiasing methods, such…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-05 Yujie Lin , Kunquan Li , Yixuan Liao , Xiaoxin Chen , Jinsong Su

The memorization of training data by Large Language Models (LLMs) poses significant risks, including privacy leaks and the regurgitation of copyrighted content. Activation steering, a technique that directly intervenes in model activations,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-11 Manan Suri , Nishit Anand , Amisha Bhaskar

Large language models (LLMs) tend to verbalize confidence scores that are largely detached from their actual accuracy, yet the geometric relationship governing this behavior remain poorly understood. In this work, we present a mechanistic…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Miranda Muqing Miao , Lyle Ungar

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-22 Julian Skifstad , Xinyue Annie Yang , Glen Chou

Although achieving promising performance, recent analyses show that current generative large language models (LLMs) may still capture dataset biases and utilize them for generation, leading to poor generalizability and harmfulness of LLMs.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-02 Li Du , Zhouhao Sun , Xiao Ding , Yixuan Ma , Yang Zhao , Kaitao Qiu , Ting Liu , Bing Qin

Advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have increased the performance of different natural language understanding as well as generation tasks. Although LLMs have breached the state-of-the-art performance in various tasks, they often…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Charaka Vinayak Kumar , Ashok Urlana , Gopichand Kanumolu , Bala Mallikarjunarao Garlapati , Pruthwik Mishra

Large language models (LLMs) offer significant potential as tools to support an expanding range of decision-making tasks. Given their training on human (created) data, LLMs have been shown to inherit societal biases against protected…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-10-07 Jessica Echterhoff , Yao Liu , Abeer Alessa , Julian McAuley , Zexue He

Activation steering has emerged as a promising alternative for controlling language-model behavior at inference time by modifying intermediate representations while keeping model parameters frozen. However, large-scale evaluations such as…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Zehao Jin , Ruixuan Deng , Junran Wang , Xinjie Shen , Chao Zhang

Latent space steering methods provide a practical approach to controlling large language models by applying steering vectors to intermediate activations, guiding outputs toward desired behaviors while avoiding retraining. Despite their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Shawn Im , Sharon Li

Large language models (LLMs) can sometimes detect when they are being evaluated and adjust their behavior to appear more aligned, compromising the reliability of safety evaluations. In this paper, we show that adding a steering vector to an…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Tim Tian Hua , Andrew Qin , Samuel Marks , Neel Nanda