Related papers: Fine-Grained Activation Steering: Steering Less, A…
Alignment in LLMs is more brittle than commonly assumed: misalignment can be triggered by adversarial prompts, benign fine-tuning, emergent misalignment, and goal misgeneralization. Recent evidence suggests that some misalignment behaviors…
Controlling multiple behavioral attributes in large language models (LLMs) at inference time is a challenging problem due to interference between attributes and the limitations of linear steering methods, which assume additive behavior in…
Large language models (LLMs) require precise behavior control for safe and effective deployment across diverse applications. Activation steering offers a promising approach for LLMs' behavioral control. We focus on the question of how…
Recent progress in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has unlocked powerful cross-modal reasoning abilities, but also raised new safety concerns, particularly when faced with adversarial multimodal inputs. To improve the safety of…
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…
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…
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…
Controlling specific behaviors in large language models while preserving their general capabilities is a central challenge for safe and reliable artificial intelligence deployment. Current steering methods, such as vector addition and…
Steering vectors have emerged as a lightweight and effective approach for aligning large language models (LLMs) at inference time, enabling modulation over model behaviors by shifting LLM representations towards a target behavior. However,…
Effective and reliable control over large language model (LLM) behavior is a significant challenge. While activation steering methods, which add steering vectors to a model's hidden states, are a promising approach, existing techniques…
A key challenge in AI alignment is guiding large language models (LLMs) to follow desired behaviors at test time. Activation steering, which modifies internal model activations during inference, offers a potential solution. However, prior…
Large language model (LLM) steering has emerged as a promising paradigm for controlling model behavior at inference time through targeted manipulation of hidden states, offering a lightweight alternative to expensive retraining. However,…
Activation steering has emerged as a powerful method for guiding the behavior of generative models towards desired outcomes such as toxicity mitigation. However, most existing methods apply interventions uniformly across all inputs,…
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…
Recent work in activation steering has demonstrated the potential to better control the outputs of Large Language Models (LLMs), but it involves finding steering vectors. This is difficult because engineers do not typically know how…
Activation steering promises to be an extremely parameter-efficient form of adaptation, but its effectiveness depends on critical design choices -- such as intervention location and parameterization -- that currently rely on empirical…
Large language models have transformed AI, yet reliably controlling their outputs remains a challenge. This paper explores activation engineering, where outputs of pre-trained LLMs are controlled by manipulating their activations at…
Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance across many generation tasks. Nevertheless, effectively aligning them with desired behaviors remains a significant challenge. Activation steering is an effective and…
This work introduces SteerVLM, a lightweight steering module designed to guide Vision-Language Models (VLMs) towards outputs that better adhere to desired instructions. Our approach learns from the latent embeddings of paired prompts…
Activation steering is a promising technique for controlling LLM behavior by adding semantically meaningful vectors directly into a model's hidden states during inference. It is often framed as a precise, interpretable, and potentially…