Related papers: Fine-Grained Activation Steering: Steering Less, A…
Steering large language models (LLMs) is usually done by either instruction prompting or activation steering. Prompting often gives strong control, but caches guidance tokens at every layer and can clutter long interactions; activation…
We propose affine concept editing (ACE) as an approach for steering language models' behavior by intervening directly in activations. We begin with an affine decomposition of model activation vectors and show that prior methods for steering…
Although large vision-language models (LVLMs) leverage rich visual token representations to achieve strong performance on multimodal tasks, these tokens also introduce significant computational overhead during inference. Existing…
The mechanisms by which reasoning training reshapes LLMs' internal computations remain unclear. We study lightweight steering vectors inserted into the base model's residual stream and trained with a reinforcement-learning objective. These…
Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable progress in their reasoning capabilities, such as Chain-of-Thought (CoT). Most approaches rely on CoT rationales. Previous studies have shown that LLMs often…
This paper proposes $\mathrm{dynActivation}$, a per-layer trainable activation defined as $f_i(x) = \mathrm{BaseAct}(x)(\alpha_i - \beta_i) + \beta_i x$, where $\alpha_i$ and $\beta_i$ are lightweight learned scalars that interpolate…
Recent work has demonstrated the potential of contrastive steering for jailbreaking Large Language Models (LLMs). However, existing methods rely on limited and inherently biased contrastive prompts and require laborious manual tuning of…
With the rapid expansion of large language models (LLMs), the demand for memory and computational resources has grown significantly. Recent advances in LLM pruning aim to reduce the size and computational cost of these models. However,…
Limited data for low-resource languages typically yield weaker language models (LMs). Since pre-training is compute-intensive, it is more pragmatic to target improvements during fine-tuning. In this work, we examine the use of Active…
Language models often default to a narrow set of high-probability outputs, leaving their generation paths homogeneous and prone to mode collapse. Sampling-based strategies inject randomness but still struggle to guarantee diversity across…
Alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs) is the ability to satisfy desired objectives during generation, which is critical for trustworthy deployment. In practice, alignment is often operationalized through multiple objectives such as…
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models leverage powerful perceptual priors from web-scale Vision-Language Model (VLM) pre-training, yet they remain surprisingly brittle in practice, frequently failing at simple robotic tasks. To mitigate this,…
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models pre-trained on large, diverse datasets show remarkable potential for general-purpose robotic manipulation. However, a primary bottleneck remains in adapting these models to downstream tasks, especially…
Activation steering methods were shown to be effective in conditioning language model generation by additively intervening over models' intermediate representations. However, the evaluation of these techniques has so far been limited to…
Controlling the behavior of large language models (LLMs) at inference time is essential for aligning outputs with human abilities and safety requirements. \emph{Activation steering} provides a lightweight alternative to prompt engineering…
Recent studies have indicated that Large Language Models (LLMs) harbor an inherent understanding of truthfulness, yet often fail to consistently express it and generate false statements. This gap between "knowing" and "telling" poses a…
As large language models (LLMs) evolve in complexity and capability, the efficacy of less widely deployed alignment techniques are uncertain. Building on previous work on activation steering and contrastive activation addition (CAA), this…
Transformers and large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized machine learning, with attention mechanisms at the core of their success. As the landscape of attention variants expands, so too do the challenges of optimizing their…
Generative verifiers have emerged as a promising paradigm for step-wise verification, but their verification behavior is often poorly calibrated: they may be under-critical and miss erroneous steps, or over-critical and reject correct…
The scaling of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) is constrained by the quality-quantity trade-off inherent in synthetic data. Previous approaches, such as LLM-as-a-Judge, have proven their effectiveness in addressing this but suffer from…