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Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) to adapt to evolving safety policies is costly and impractical. Mechanistic interpretability enables inference-time control through latent activation steering, yet its potential for precise,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Shaona Ghosh , Amrita Bhattacharjee , Yftah Ziser , Christopher Parisien

As large language models (LLMs) show impressive performance on complex tasks, they still struggle with longer contextual understanding and high computational costs. To balance efficiency and quality, we introduce LLMSteer, a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-22 Zhuohan Gu , Jiayi Yao , Kuntai Du , Junchen Jiang

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable capabilities across various tasks, yet guiding them to follow desired behaviours during inference remains a significant challenge. Activation steering offers a promising method to control the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Weixuan Wang , Minghao Wu , Barry Haddow , Alexandra Birch

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities and have been extensively deployed across various domains, including recommender systems. Prior research has employed specialized \textit{prompts} to leverage the…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Sichun Luo , Bowei He , Haohan Zhao , Wei Shao , Yanlin Qi , Yinya Huang , Aojun Zhou , Yuxuan Yao , Zongpeng Li , Yuanzhang Xiao , Mingjie Zhan , Linqi Song

Supervised ranking methods based on bi-encoder or cross-encoder architectures have shown success in multi-stage text ranking tasks, but they require large amounts of relevance judgments as training data. In this work, we propose Listwise…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2023-05-04 Xueguang Ma , Xinyu Zhang , Ronak Pradeep , Jimmy Lin

In this paper, we introduce Rank-R1, a novel LLM-based reranker that performs reasoning over both the user query and candidate documents before performing the ranking task. Existing document reranking methods based on large language models…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-03-11 Shengyao Zhuang , Xueguang Ma , Bevan Koopman , Jimmy Lin , Guido Zuccon

We provide a systematic understanding of the impact of specific components and wordings used in prompts on the effectiveness of rankers based on zero-shot Large Language Models (LLMs). Several zero-shot ranking methods based on LLMs have…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-07-28 Shuoqi Sun , Shengyao Zhuang , Shuai Wang , Guido Zuccon

Large language models (LLMs) are prone to capturing biases from training corpus, leading to potential negative social impacts. Existing prompt-based debiasing methods exhibit instability due to their sensitivity to prompt changes, while…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Yichen Li , Zhiting Fan , Ruizhe Chen , Xiaotang Gai , Luqi Gong , Yan Zhang , Zuozhu Liu

As LLMs are increasingly deployed in real-world applications, ensuring their ability to refuse malicious prompts, especially jailbreak attacks, is essential for safe and reliable use. Recently, activation steering has emerged as an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Leheng Sheng , Changshuo Shen , Weixiang Zhao , Junfeng Fang , Xiaohao Liu , Zhenkai Liang , Xiang Wang , An Zhang , Tat-Seng Chua

Activation-based control steers large language models (LLMs) by intervening on their internal representations during inference, and has emerged as an effective paradigm for controlling behaviors such as persona and style. However, existing…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Yingdong Shi , Ruiming Zhang , Changming Li , Zhiyu Yang , Kaixing Zhang , Jingyi Yu , Kan Ren

Recent studies have highlighted the significant potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) as zero-shot relevance rankers. These methods predominantly utilize prompt learning to assess the relevance between queries and documents by…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2024-11-08 Dezhi Ye , Junwei Hu , Jiabin Fan , Bowen Tian , Jie Liu , Haijin Liang , Jin Ma

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

Information retrieval (IR) systems have played a vital role in modern digital life and have cemented their continued usefulness in this new era of generative AI via retrieval-augmented generation. With strong language processing…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Shijie Chen , Bernal Jiménez Gutiérrez , Yu Su

Stance classification, the task of predicting the viewpoint of an author on a subject of interest, has long been a focal point of research in domains ranging from social science to machine learning. Current stance detection methods rely…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-07 Iain J. Cruickshank , Lynnette Hui Xian Ng

Changing the behavior of large language models (LLMs) can be as straightforward as editing the Transformer's residual streams using appropriately constructed "steering vectors." These modifications to internal neural activations, a form of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Jian-Qiao Zhu , Haijiang Yan , Thomas L. Griffiths

The ability to follow instructions is crucial for numerous real-world applications of language models. In pursuit of deeper insights and more powerful capabilities, we derive instruction-specific vector representations from language models…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-15 Alessandro Stolfo , Vidhisha Balachandran , Safoora Yousefi , Eric Horvitz , Besmira Nushi

An unintended consequence of the vast pretraining of Large Language Models (LLMs) is the verbatim memorization of fragments of their training data, which may contain sensitive or copyrighted information. In recent years, unlearning has…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-06 Atakan Seyitoğlu , Aleksei Kuvshinov , Leo Schwinn , Stephan Günnemann

Existing methods fail to effectively steer Large Language Models (LLMs) between textual reasoning and code generation, leaving symbolic computing capabilities underutilized. We introduce CodeSteer, an effective method for guiding LLM…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Yongchao Chen , Yilun Hao , Yueying Liu , Yang Zhang , Chuchu Fan

Despite significant progress in alignment, large language models (LLMs) remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks that elicit harmful behaviors. Activation steering techniques offer a promising inference-time intervention approach, but…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-28 Quy-Anh Dang , Chris Ngo

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to ranking tasks in retrieval and recommendation. Although reasoning prompting can enhance ranking utility, our preliminary exploration reveals that its benefits are inconsistent and…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Huizhong Guo , Tianjun Wei , Dongxia Wang , Yingpeng Du , Ziyan Wang , Jie Zhang , Zhu Sun