Related papers: Fine-Grained Activation Steering: Steering Less, A…
Vision Language Models (VLMs) can produce unintended and harmful content when exposed to adversarial attacks, particularly because their vision capabilities create new vulnerabilities. Existing defenses, such as input preprocessing,…
We investigate empathy-in-action -- the willingness to sacrifice task efficiency to address human needs -- as a linear direction in LLM activation space. Using contrastive prompts grounded in the Empathy-in-Action (EIA) benchmark, we test…
Large Language Models (LLMs) trained for average correctness often exhibit mode collapse, producing narrow decision behaviors on tasks where multiple responses may be reasonable. This limitation is particularly problematic in ordinal…
The memorization of training data by Large Language Models (LLMs) poses significant risks, including privacy leaks and the regurgitation of copyrighted content. Activation steering, a technique that directly intervenes in model activations,…
Modern large language models (LLMs) are typically secured by auditing data, prompts, and refusal policies, while treating the forward pass as an implementation detail. We show that intermediate activations in decoder-only LLMs form a…
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…
Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures in Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly reduced inference costs through sparse activation. However, this sparse activation paradigm also introduces new safety challenges. Since only a subset…
We introduce Mechanistic Error Reduction with Abstention (MERA), a principled framework for steering language models (LMs) to mitigate errors through selective, adaptive interventions. Unlike existing methods that rely on fixed, manually…
Researchers have been studying approaches to steer the behavior of Large Language Models (LLMs) and build personalized LLMs tailored for various applications. While fine-tuning seems to be a direct solution, it requires substantial…
Activation steering provides parameter-efficient control over large language models (LLMs) at inference time, but many methods rely on off-distribution supervision and discrete masking, leading to brittle interventions. We propose ROAST…
Large language models (LLMs) often encode cognitive behaviors unpredictably across prompts, layers, and contexts, making them difficult to diagnose and control. We present CBMAS, a diagnostic framework for continuous activation steering,…
Discrete diffusion language models (DLMs) generate text by iteratively denoising all positions in parallel, offering an alternative to autoregressive models. Controlled generation methods for DLMs, imported from autoregressive models, apply…
The complexity of the real world demands robotic systems that can intelligently adapt to unseen situations. We present STEER, a robot learning framework that bridges high-level, commonsense reasoning with precise, flexible low-level…
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…
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) often exhibit significant modality preference, which is a tendency to favor one modality over another. Depending on the input, they may over-rely on linguistic priors relative to visual evidence, or…
Large language models exhibit strong multilingual capabilities, yet significant performance gaps persist between dominant and non-dominant languages. Prior work attributes this gap to imbalances between shared and language-specific neurons…
Activation steering is a popular white-box control technique that modifies model activations to elicit an abstract change in its behavior. It has also become a standard tool in interpretability (e.g., probing truthfulness, or translating…
Latent space steering methods provide a practical approach to controlling large language models by applying steering vectors to intermediate activations, guiding outputs toward desired behaviors while avoiding retraining. Despite their…
Large language models (LLMs) can sometimes detect when they are being evaluated and adjust their behavior to appear more aligned, compromising the reliability of safety evaluations. In this paper, we show that adding a steering vector to an…
Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) can extract interpretable features from large language models (LLMs) without supervision. However, their effectiveness in downstream steering tasks is limited by the requirement for contrastive datasets or large…