Related papers: Fine-Grained Activation Steering: Steering Less, A…
Vision Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in integrating visual and textual information for understanding and reasoning, but remain highly vulnerable to adversarial attacks. While activation steering has…
Activation steering has emerged as a promising approach for efficiently adapting large language models (LLMs) to downstream behaviors. However, most existing steering methods rely on a single static direction per task or concept, making…
Large language models (LLMs) have recently shown strong performance as zero-shot rankers, yet their effectiveness is highly sensitive to prompt formulation, particularly role-play instructions. Prior analyses suggest that role-related…
Steering methods influence Large Language Model behavior by identifying semantic directions in hidden representations, but are typically realized through inference-time activation interventions that apply a fixed, global modification to the…
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…
Activation steering -- adding a vector to a model's residual stream to modify its behavior -- is widely used in safety evaluations as if the model cannot detect the intervention. We test this assumption, introducing steering awareness: a…
Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) - particularly model scaling and test-time techniques - have greatly enhanced the reasoning capabilities of language models at the expense of higher inference costs. To lower inference costs,…
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…
Inference-time intervention (ITI) has emerged as a promising method for steering large language model (LLM) behavior in a particular direction (e.g., improving helpfulness) by intervening on token representations without costly updates to…
Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) exhibit outstanding performance on vision-language tasks but struggle with hallucination problems. Through in-depth analysis of LVLM activation patterns, we reveal two key findings: 1) truthfulness and…
Large Language Models (LLMs) often rely on long chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning to solve complex tasks. While effective, these trajectories are frequently inefficient, leading to high latency from excessive token generation, or unstable…
Recent advances in Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in solving complex tasks such as mathematics and coding. However, these models frequently exhibit a phenomenon known as overthinking during…
Activation steering methods control large language model (LLM) behavior by modifying internal activations at inference time. However, most existing activation steering methods rely on a fixed steering strength, leading to either…
Linear activation steering is a powerful approach for eliciting the capabilities of large language models and specializing their behavior using limited labeled data. While effective, existing methods often apply a fixed steering strength to…
The growing use of generative models in daily life calls for efficient mechanisms to control their generation, to e.g., produce safe content or provide users with tools to explore style changes. Ideally, such mechanisms should require low…
Activation steering has emerged as a promising alternative for controlling language-model behavior at inference time by modifying intermediate representations while keeping model parameters frozen. However, large-scale evaluations such as…
Activation steering is a widely used approach for controlling large language model (LLM) behavior by intervening on internal representations. Existing methods largely rely on the Linear Representation Hypothesis, assuming behavioral…
Activation steering has emerged as a powerful tool to shape LLM behavior without the need for weight updates. While its inherent brittleness and unreliability are well-documented, its safety implications remain underexplored. In this work,…
Large language models that require multiple GPU cards to host are usually the most capable models. It is necessary to understand and steer these models, but the current technologies do not support the interpretability and steering of these…
Activation steering methods are widely used to control large language model (LLM) behavior and are often interpreted as revealing meaningful internal representations. This interpretation assumes that steering directions are identifiable and…