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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

Preference alignment methods are increasingly critical for steering large language models (LLMs) to generate outputs consistent with human values. While recent approaches often rely on synthetic data generated by LLMs for scalability and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Mingye Zhu , Yi Liu , Zheren Fu , Yongdong Zhang , Zhendong Mao

In various work contexts, such as meeting scheduling, collaborating, and project planning, collective decision-making is essential but often challenging due to diverse individual preferences, varying work focuses, and power dynamics among…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-13 Marios Papachristou , Longqi Yang , Chin-Chia Hsu

Multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable success on complex multi-modal tasks. However, it remains insufficiently explored whether they exhibit $\textbf{modality preference}$, a tendency to favor one modality over…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-05 Yu Zhang , Jinlong Ma , Yongshuai Hou , Xuefeng Bai , Kehai Chen , Yang Xiang , Jun Yu , Min Zhang

Reinforcement learning (RL) is increasingly being used in the healthcare domain, particularly for the development of personalized health adaptive interventions. Inspired by the success of Large Language Models (LLMs), we are interested in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-14 Karine Karine , Benjamin M. Marlin

A critical factor in the success of decision support systems is the accurate modeling of user preferences. Psychology research has demonstrated that users often develop their preferences during the elicitation process, highlighting the…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2024-10-03 Connor Lawless , Jakob Schoeffer , Lindy Le , Kael Rowan , Shilad Sen , Cristina St. Hill , Jina Suh , Bahareh Sarrafzadeh

Standard methods for aligning large language models with human preferences learn from pairwise comparisons among sampled candidate responses and regularize toward a reference policy. Despite their effectiveness, the effects of sampling and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Yurong Chen , Yu He , Michael I. Jordan , Fan Yao

Aligned representations across languages is a desired property in multilingual large language models (mLLMs), as alignment can improve performance in cross-lingual tasks. Typically alignment requires fine-tuning a model, which is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-22 Anirudh Sundar , Sinead Williamson , Katherine Metcalf , Barry-John Theobald , Skyler Seto , Masha Fedzechkina

Aligning large language models (LLMs) depends on high-quality datasets of human preference labels, which are costly to collect. Although active learning has been studied to improve sample efficiency relative to passive collection, many…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Yao Zhao , Kwang-Sung Jun

Personalized preference alignment for large language models (LLMs), the process of tailoring LLMs to individual users' preferences, is an emerging research direction spanning the area of NLP and personalization. In this survey, we present…

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human intentions has become a critical task for safely deploying models in real-world systems. While existing alignment approaches have seen empirical success, theoretically understanding how these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-08 Shawn Im , Yixuan Li

Large language models (LLMs) can be controlled at inference time through prompts (in-context learning) and internal activations (activation steering). Different accounts have been proposed to explain these methods, yet their common goal of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-13 Eric Bigelow , Daniel Wurgaft , YingQiao Wang , Noah Goodman , Tomer Ullman , Hidenori Tanaka , Ekdeep Singh Lubana

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences has been recognized as the key to improving LLMs' interaction quality. However, in this pluralistic world, human preferences can be diversified due to annotators' different…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-10-08 Dun Zeng , Yong Dai , Pengyu Cheng , Longyue Wang , Tianhao Hu , Wanshun Chen , Nan Du , Zenglin Xu

The field of large language models (LLMs) has grown rapidly in recent years, driven by the desire for better efficiency, interpretability, and safe use. Building on the novel approach of "activation engineering," this study explores…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-26 Rumi Allbert , James K. Wiles , Vlad Grankovsky

Preference alignment is a critical step in making Large Language Models (LLMs) useful and aligned with (human) preferences. Existing approaches such as Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback or Direct Preference Optimization typically…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Lucio La Cava , Andrea Tagarelli

Code LLMs often default to particular programming languages and libraries under neutral prompts. We investigate whether these preferences are encoded as approximately linear directions in activation space that can be manipulated at…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-30 Md Mahbubur Rahman , Arjun Guha , Harshitha Menon

Steering, or direct manipulation of internal activations to guide LLM responses toward specific semantic concepts, is emerging as a promising avenue for both understanding how semantic concepts are stored within LLMs and advancing LLM…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Parmida Davarmanesh , Ashia Wilson , Adityanarayanan Radhakrishnan

Alignment, endowing a pre-trained Large language model (LLM) with the ability to follow instructions, is crucial for its real-world applications. Conventional supervised fine-tuning (SFT) methods formalize it as causal language modeling…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-18 Yuchen Fan , Yuzhong Hong , Qiushi Wang , Junwei Bao , Hongfei Jiang , Yang Song

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences is critical for enhancing LLMs' safety, helpfulness, humor, faithfulness, etc. Current reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) mainly focuses on a fixed reward learned…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Qiang He , Yucheng Yang , Tianyi Zhou , Meng Fang , Mykola Pechenizkiy , Setareh Maghsudi

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit impressive capabilities across a wide range of tasks, yet the choice of which model to use often involves a trade-off between performance and cost. More powerful models, though effective, come with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Isaac Ong , Amjad Almahairi , Vincent Wu , Wei-Lin Chiang , Tianhao Wu , Joseph E. Gonzalez , M Waleed Kadous , Ion Stoica