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Related papers: Fine-Grained Activation Steering: Steering Less, A…

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Activation steering offers a computationally efficient mechanism for controlling Large Language Models (LLMs) without fine-tuning. While effectively controlling target traits (e.g., persona), coherency degradation remains a major obstacle…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Yoshihiro Izawa , Gouki Minegishi , Koshi Eguchi , Sosuke Hosokawa , Kenjiro Taura

Large Language Models (LLMs) can enhance reasoning capabilities through test-time scaling by generating multiple traces. However, the combination of lengthy reasoning traces with multiple sampling introduces substantial computation and high…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-29 Zhixiang Liang , Beichen Huang , Zheng Wang , Minjia Zhang

Steering vectors are a lightweight method for controlling language model behavior by adding a learned bias to the activations at inference time. Although effective on average, steering effect sizes vary across samples and are unreliable for…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-23 Joschka Braun

The rapid evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) is transforming AI, opening new opportunities in sensitive and high-impact areas such as Mental Health (MH). Yet, despite these advancements, recent evidence reveals that smaller-scale…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Federico Ravenda , Seyed Ali Bahrainian , Andrea Raballo , Antonietta Mira

We present a novel approach to bias mitigation in large language models (LLMs) by applying steering vectors to modify model activations in forward passes. We compute 8 steering vectors, each corresponding to a different social bias axis,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Zara Siddique , Irtaza Khalid , Liam D. Turner , Luis Espinosa-Anke

Masked diffusion language models (MDLMs) generate text via iterative masked-token denoising, enabling mask-parallel decoding and distinct controllability and efficiency tradeoffs from autoregressive LLMs. Yet, efficient representation-level…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Adi Shnaidman , Erin Feiglin , Osher Yaari , Efrat Mentel , Amit Levi , Raz Lapid

Audio diffusion models can synthesize high-fidelity music from text, yet achieving fine-grained control over specific musical attributes remains challenging, as their internal mechanisms for representing high-level concepts are poorly…

Sound · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Łukasz Staniszewski , Katarzyna Zaleska , Mateusz Modrzejewski , Kamil Deja

Micro-expression Action Unit (AU) detection identifies localized AUs from subtle facial muscle activations, providing a foundation for decoding affective cues. Previous methods face three key limitations: (1) heavy reliance on low-density…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Zhishu Liu , Kaishen Yuan , Bo Zhao , Hui Ma , Zitong Yu

We introduce Refusal Steering, an inference-time method to exercise fine-grained control over Large Language Models refusal behaviour on politically sensitive topics without retraining. We replace fragile pattern-based refusal detection…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-25 Iker García-Ferrero , David Montero , Roman Orus

Reflection, the ability of large language models (LLMs) to evaluate and revise their own reasoning, has been widely used to improve performance on complex reasoning tasks. Yet, most prior works emphasizes designing reflective prompting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-12 Fu-Chieh Chang , Yu-Ting Lee , Pei-Yuan Wu

The increasing capabilities of large generative models and their ever more widespread deployment have raised concerns about their reliability, safety, and potential misuse. To address these issues, recent works have proposed to control…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-25 Pau Rodriguez , Arno Blaas , Michal Klein , Luca Zappella , Nicholas Apostoloff , Marco Cuturi , Xavier Suau

Representation Misdirection for Unlearning (RMU), which steers model representation in the intermediate layer to a target random representation, is an effective method for large language model (LLM) unlearning. Despite its high performance,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-07 Dang Huu-Tien , Trung-Tin Pham , Hoang Thanh-Tung , Naoya Inoue

We explore the internal mechanisms of how bias emerges in large language models (LLMs) when provided with ambiguous comparative prompts: inputs that compare or enforce choosing between two or more entities without providing clear context…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-31 Rishabh Adiga , Besmira Nushi , Varun Chandrasekaran

This work examines whether activating latent subspaces in language models (LLMs) can steer scientific code generation toward a specific programming language. Five causal LLMs were first evaluated on scientific coding prompts to quantify…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-06-24 Vansh Sharma , Venkat Raman

Policy steering is an emerging way to adapt robot behaviors at deployment-time: a learned verifier analyzes low-level action samples proposed by a pre-trained policy (e.g., diffusion policy) and selects only those aligned with the task.…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Jessie Yuan , Yilin Wu , Andrea Bajcsy

Activation steering methods in large language models (LLMs) have emerged as an effective way to perform targeted updates to enhance generated language without requiring large amounts of adaptation data. We ask whether the features…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-05 Masha Fedzechkina , Eleonora Gualdoni , Sinead Williamson , Katherine Metcalf , Skyler Seto , Barry-John Theobald

While large language models (LLMs) are trained to align with human values, their generations may still violate safety constraints. A growing line of work addresses this problem by modifying the model's sampling policy at decoding time using…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Bat-Sheva Einbinder , Hen Davidov , Yee Whye Teh , Yarin Gal , Yaniv Romano

Activation engineering is becoming increasingly popular as a means of online control of large language models (LLMs). In this work, we extend the idea of inference-time steering with vectors that represent a behavioral direction of interest…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-26 Christopher M. Ackerman

Understanding and controlling the behavior of large language models (LLMs) is an increasingly important topic in multilingual NLP. Beyond prompting or fine-tuning, , i.e.,~manipulating internal representations during inference, has emerged…

Providing high-quality feedback to Large Language Models (LLMs) on a diverse training distribution can be difficult and expensive, and providing feedback only on a narrow distribution can result in unintended generalizations. To better…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Constanza Fierro , Fabien Roger