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Related papers: Towards Understanding Steering Strength

200 papers

Steering vectors offer a training-free mechanism for controlling reasoning behaviors in large language models, but constructing effective vectors requires identifying genuine behavioral signals in the model's hidden states. For behaviors…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-03 Haomin Zhuang , Hojun Yoo , Xiaonan Luo , Kehan Guo , Xiangliang Zhang

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive performance in natural language tasks, but their outputs can exhibit undesirable attributes or biases. Existing methods for steering LLMs toward desired attributes often assume unbiased…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-05 Zhixuan Chu , Yan Wang , Longfei Li , Zhibo Wang , Zhan Qin , Kui Ren

Controlling the behavior of large language models (LLMs) at inference time is essential for aligning outputs with human abilities and safety requirements. \emph{Activation steering} provides a lightweight alternative to prompt engineering…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Diaoulé Diallo , Katharina Dworatzyk , Sophie Jentzsch , Peer Schütt , Sabine Theis , Tobias Hecking

Current evaluations of Large Language Model (LLM) steering techniques focus on task-specific performance, overlooking how well steered representations align with human cognition. Using a well-established triadic similarity judgment task, we…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Zach Studdiford , Timothy T. Rogers , Siddharth Suresh , Kushin Mukherjee

In this paper, we evaluate the capability of transformer-based language models in making inferences over uncertain text that includes uncertain rules of reasoning. We cover both Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) and generative Large…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-12 Aliakbar Nafar , Kristen Brent Venable , Parisa Kordjamshidi

Recent advances in automated theorem proving use Large Language Models (LLMs) to translate informal mathematical statements into formal proofs. However, informal cues are often ambiguous or lack strict logical structure, making it hard for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Shashank Kirtania , Arun Iyer

Understanding and controlling the behavior of large language models (LLMs) is an increasingly important topic in multilingual NLP. Beyond prompting or fine-tuning, , i.e.,~manipulating internal representations during inference, has emerged…

Prior work on controllable text generation has focused on learning how to control language models through trainable decoding, smart-prompt design, or fine-tuning based on a desired objective. We hypothesize that the information needed to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-05-12 Nishant Subramani , Nivedita Suresh , Matthew E. Peters

Large language models (LLMs) have multilingual capabilities and can solve tasks across various languages. However, we show that current LLMs make key decisions in a representation space closest to English, regardless of their input and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-24 Lisa Schut , Yarin Gal , Sebastian Farquhar

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as decision-support tools in data-constrained scientific workflows, where correctness and validity are critical. However, evaluation practices often emphasize stability or reproducibility…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-18 Nazia Riasat

Recent work on activation and latent steering has demonstrated that modifying internal representations can effectively guide large language models (LLMs) toward improved reasoning and efficiency without additional training. However, most…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-07 Tuc Nguyen , Thai Le

Methods for controlling large language models (LLMs), including local weight fine-tuning, LoRA-based adaptation, and activation-based interventions, are often studied in isolation, obscuring their connections and making comparison…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Ziwen Xu , Chenyan Wu , Hengyu Sun , Haiwen Hong , Mengru Wang , Yunzhi Yao , Longtao Huang , Hui Xue , Shumin Deng , Zhixuan Chu , Huajun Chen , Ningyu Zhang

Many capable large language models (LLMs) are developed via self-supervised pre-training followed by a reinforcement-learning fine-tuning phase, often based on human or AI feedback. During this stage, models may be guided by their inductive…

Despite advances in large language models (LLMs) on reasoning and instruction-following tasks, it is unclear whether they can reliably produce outputs aligned with a variety of user goals, a concept called steerability. Two gaps in current…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Trenton Chang , Tobias Schnabel , Adith Swaminathan , Jenna Wiens

Large language models (LLMs) show remarkable capabilities across a variety of tasks. Despite the models only seeing text in training, several recent studies suggest that LLM representations implicitly capture aspects of the underlying…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-16 Yutaro Yamada , Yihan Bao , Andrew K. Lampinen , Jungo Kasai , Ilker Yildirim

Multilingual Large Language Models (LLMs) often exhibit hallucinations such as unintended code-switching, reducing reliability in downstream tasks. We propose latent-space language steering, a lightweight inference-time method that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Andrey Goncharov , Nikolai Kondusov , Alexey Zaytsev

Representation Misdirection for Unlearning (RMU), which steers model representation in the intermediate layer to a target random representation, is an effective method for large language model (LLM) unlearning. Despite its high performance,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-07 Dang Huu-Tien , Trung-Tin Pham , Hoang Thanh-Tung , Naoya Inoue

While scaling laws for large language models (LLMs) during pre-training have been extensively studied, their behavior under reinforcement learning (RL) post-training remains largely unexplored. This paper presents a systematic empirical…

Steering methods have emerged as effective and targeted tools for guiding large language models' (LLMs) behavior without modifying their parameters. Multimodal large language models (MLLMs), however, do not currently enjoy the same suite of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-21 Woody Haosheng Gan , Deqing Fu , Julian Asilis , Ollie Liu , Dani Yogatama , Vatsal Sharan , Robin Jia , Willie Neiswanger

System prompts provide a lightweight yet powerful mechanism for conditioning large language models (LLMs) at inference time. While prior work has focused on English-only settings, real-world deployments benefit from having a single prompt…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-03 Lechen Zhang , Yusheng Zhou , Tolga Ergen , Lajanugen Logeswaran , Moontae Lee , David Jurgens