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Related papers: On the Non-Identifiability of Steering Vectors in …

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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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-13 Mehdi Jafari , Hao Xue , Flora Salim

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Tetiana Bas , Krystian Novak

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-15 Alessandro Stolfo , Vidhisha Balachandran , Safoora Yousefi , Eric Horvitz , Besmira Nushi

As large language models (LLMs) become more integrated into societal systems, the risk of them perpetuating and amplifying harmful biases becomes a critical safety concern. Traditional methods for mitigating bias often rely on data…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-08-13 Shivam Dubey

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit highly anisotropic internal representations, often characterized by massive activations, a phenomenon where a small subset of feature dimensions possesses magnitudes significantly larger than the rest.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Youngji Roh , Hyunjin Cho , Jaehyung Kim

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

This paper investigates how Large Language Models (LLMs) represent non-English tokens -- a question that remains underexplored despite recent progress. We propose a lightweight intervention method using representation steering, where a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-27 Omar Mahmoud , Buddhika Laknath Semage , Thommen George Karimpanal , Santu Rana

Changing the behavior of large language models (LLMs) can be as straightforward as editing the Transformer's residual streams using appropriately constructed "steering vectors." These modifications to internal neural activations, a form of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Jian-Qiao Zhu , Haijiang Yan , Thomas L. Griffiths

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-09 Kartik Sharma , Rakshit S. Trivedi

Large Language Models (LLMs) often generate inconsistent responses when prompted with semantically equivalent paraphrased inputs. Recently, activation steering, a technique that modulates LLMs' behaviours by adjusting their latent…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-23 Jingyuan Yang , Rongjun Li , Weixuan Wang , Ziyu Zhou , Zhiyong Feng , Wei Peng

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Diaoulé Diallo , Katharina Dworatzyk , Sophie Jentzsch , Peer Schütt , Sabine Theis , Tobias Hecking

Applying steering vectors to large language models (LLMs) is an efficient and effective model alignment technique, but we lack an interpretable explanation for how it works-- specifically, what internal mechanisms steering vectors affect…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-10 Stephen Cheng , Sarah Wiegreffe , Dinesh Manocha

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Shivam Raval , Hae Jin Song , Linlin Wu , Abir Harrasse , Jeff M. Phillips , Fazl Barez , Amirali Abdullah

Activation steering is a practical post-training model alignment technique to enhance the utility of Large Language Models (LLMs). Prior to deploying a model as a service, developers can steer a pre-trained model toward specific behavioral…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Chen Xiong , Zhiyuan He , Pin-Yu Chen , Ching-Yun Ko , Tsung-Yi Ho

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…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-02-26 Jianghao Yin , Qin Chen , Kedi Chen , Jie Zhou , Xingjiao Wu , Liang He

An unintended consequence of the vast pretraining of Large Language Models (LLMs) is the verbatim memorization of fragments of their training data, which may contain sensitive or copyrighted information. In recent years, unlearning has…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-06 Atakan Seyitoğlu , Aleksei Kuvshinov , Leo Schwinn , Stephan Günnemann

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

This research explores strategies for steering the output of large language models (LLMs) towards specific styles, such as sentiment, emotion, or writing style, by adding style vectors to the activations of hidden layers during text…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-05 Kai Konen , Sophie Jentzsch , Diaoulé Diallo , Peer Schütt , Oliver Bensch , Roxanne El Baff , Dominik Opitz , Tobias Hecking

Activation steering presupposes that task-relevant behaviors correspond to linear directions in activation space -- directions that should both steer the model and be readable along the unembedding. Function vectors (FVs), extracted as mean…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Mohammed Suhail B Nadaf

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Aayush Mishra , Daniel Khashabi , Anqi Liu
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