Related papers: Endogenous Resistance to Activation Steering in La…
In-context learning, the ability to adapt based on a few examples in the input prompt, is a ubiquitous feature of large language models (LLMs). However, as LLMs' in-context learning abilities continue to improve, understanding this…
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…
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…
Despite significant progress in alignment, large language models (LLMs) remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks that elicit harmful behaviors. Activation steering techniques offer a promising inference-time intervention approach, but…
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…
Large Language Model (LLM) deployment requires guiding the LLM to recognize and not answer unsafe prompts while complying with safe prompts. Previous methods for achieving this require adjusting model weights along with other expensive…
Effective and reliable control over large language model (LLM) behavior is a significant challenge. While activation steering methods, which add steering vectors to a model's hidden states, are a promising approach, existing techniques…
Latent steering exploits internal representations of Large Language Models (LLMs) to guide generation, yet interventions on dense states can entangle distinct semantic features. In this paper, we investigate attention query activations as a…
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…
LLMs are increasingly being used in healthcare. This promises to free physicians from drudgery, enabling better care to be delivered at scale. But the use of LLMs in this space also brings risks; for example, such models may worsen existing…
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) provide a powerful mechanism for decomposing the dense representations produced by Large Language Models (LLMs) into interpretable latent features. We posit that SAEs constitute a natural foundation for Learned…
Steering has emerged as a promising approach in controlling large language models (LLMs) without modifying model parameters. However, most existing steering methods rely on large-scale datasets to learn clear behavioral information, which…
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…
Role-playing has emerged as an effective technique for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, existing methods primarily rely on prompt engineering, which often lacks stability and interpretability.…
Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance across many generation tasks. Nevertheless, effectively aligning them with desired behaviors remains a significant challenge. Activation steering is an effective and…
Large language models (LLMs) are now ubiquitous in user-facing applications, yet they still generate undesirable toxic outputs, including profanity, vulgarity, and derogatory remarks. Although numerous detoxification methods exist, most…
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are increasingly used to extract activation directions for inference-time steering, but their standard sparsity objective treats latent features as independent. This prior can be poorly matched to high-level…
Recent work discovered Emergent Misalignment (EM): fine-tuning large language models on narrowly harmful datasets can lead them to become broadly misaligned. A survey of experts prior to publication revealed this was highly unexpected,…
As large language models (LLMs) grow in scale and capability, understanding their internal mechanisms becomes increasingly critical. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a key tool in mechanistic interpretability, enabling the…
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) decompose language model representations into a sparse set of linear latent vectors. Recent works have improved SAEs using language model gradients, but these techniques require many expensive backward passes…