Related papers: RankSteer: Activation Steering for Pointwise LLM R…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as promising zero-shot rankers, but their performance is highly sensitive to prompt formulation. In particular, role-play prompts, where the model is assigned a functional role or identity, often…

Large reasoning models (LRMs) enhance problem-solving capabilities by generating explicit multi-step chains of thought (CoT) reasoning; however, they incur substantial inference latency and computational overhead. To mitigate this issue,…

Recently, large language models (LLMs) (e.g., GPT-4) have demonstrated impressive general-purpose task-solving abilities, including the potential to approach recommendation tasks. Along this line of research, this work aims to investigate…

Recent studies have demonstrated the great potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) serving as zero-shot relevance rankers. The typical approach involves making comparisons between pairs or lists of documents. Although effective, these…

Large language models (LLMs) obtain state of the art zero shot relevance ranking performance on a variety of information retrieval tasks. The two most common prompts to elicit LLM relevance judgments are pointwise scoring (a.k.a. relevance…

Large language models (LLMs) have recently shown strong reasoning abilities in domains like mathematics, coding, and scientific problem-solving, yet their potential for ranking tasks, where prime examples include retrieval, recommender…

We propose a novel zero-shot document ranking approach based on Large Language Models (LLMs): the Setwise prompting approach. Our approach complements existing prompting approaches for LLM-based zero-shot ranking: Pointwise, Pairwise, and…

Activation steering methods enable inference-time control of large language model (LLM) behavior without retraining, but current approaches face a fundamental trade-off: sample-efficient methods suboptimally capture steering signals from…

Role-playing has emerged as an effective technique for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, existing methods primarily rely on prompt engineering, which often lacks stability and interpretability.…

Zero-shot text rankers powered by recent LLMs achieve remarkable ranking performance by simply prompting. Existing prompts for pointwise LLM rankers mostly ask the model to choose from binary relevance labels like "Yes" and "No". However,…

Activation-based steering enables Large Language Models (LLMs) to exhibit targeted behaviors by intervening on intermediate activations without retraining. Despite its widespread use, the mechanistic factors that govern when steering…

Large Language Models (LLMs) often generate inconsistent responses when prompted with semantically equivalent paraphrased inputs. Recently, activation steering, a technique that modulates LLMs' behaviours by adjusting their latent…

Large Language Models (LLMs), despite advances in instruction tuning, often fail to follow complex user instructions. Activation steering techniques aim to mitigate this by manipulating model internals, but have a potential risk of…

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…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are being increasingly explored as general-purpose tools for recommendation tasks, enabling zero-shot and instruction-following capabilities without the need for task-specific training. While the research…

Large language models can be steered at inference time through prompting or activation interventions, but activation steering methods often underperform compared to prompt-based approaches. We propose a framework that formulates prompt…

Recent advancements in language models (LMs) have marked a shift toward the growing importance of post-training. Yet, post-training approaches such as supervised fine-tuning (SFT) do not guarantee the effective use of knowledge acquired…

Steering language models (LMs) by modifying internal activations is a popular approach for controlling text generation. Unsupervised dictionary learning methods, e.g., sparse autoencoders, can be scaled to produce many steering vectors, but…

Recent work on domain-specific reasoning with large language models (LLMs) often relies on training-intensive approaches that require parameter updates. While activation steering has emerged as a parameter efficient alternative, existing…

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…