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Related papers: Steer2Edit: From Activation Steering to Component-…

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Sparse Autoencoders uncover thousands of features in vision models, yet explaining these features without requiring human intervention remains an open challenge. While previous work has proposed generating correlation-based explanations…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-26 Javier Ferrando , Enrique Lopez-Cuena , Pablo Agustin Martin-Torres , Daniel Hinjos , Anna Arias-Duart , Dario Garcia-Gasulla

Inference-time steering offers a promising way to control language models (LMs) without retraining. However, standard approaches typically rely on activation addition, which inevitably alters the hidden-state magnitudes raising concerns…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Zejia You , Chunyuan Deng , Hanjie Chen

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

Deploying LLMs in real-world applications requires controllable output that satisfies multiple desiderata at the same time. While existing work extensively addresses LLM steering for a single behavior, \textit{compositional steering} --…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Gorjan Radevski , Kiril Gashteovski , Giwon Hong , Carolin Lawrence , Goran Glavaš

Recent progress in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has unlocked powerful cross-modal reasoning abilities, but also raised new safety concerns, particularly when faced with adversarial multimodal inputs. To improve the safety of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-24 Lyucheng Wu , Mengru Wang , Ziwen Xu , Tri Cao , Nay Oo , Bryan Hooi , Shumin Deng

Activation steering methods are widely used to control large language model (LLM) behavior and are often interpreted as revealing meaningful internal representations. This interpretation assumes that steering directions are identifiable and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Sohan Venkatesh , Ashish Mahendran Kurapath

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as knowledge bases, but keeping them up to date requires targeted knowledge editing (KE). However, it remains unclear how edits are implemented inside the model once applied. In this work,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Yuan Cao , Mingyang Wang , Hinrich Schütze

Safety-aligned large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world pipelines, yet this deployment also enlarges the supply-chain attack surface: adversaries can distribute backdoored checkpoints that behave normally under…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Rui Yin , Tianxu Han , Naen Xu , Changjiang Li , Ping He , Chunyi Zhou , Jun Wang , Zhihui Fu , Tianyu Du , Jinbao Li , Shouling Ji

Multilingual Large Language Models (LLMs) often exhibit hallucinations such as unintended code-switching, reducing reliability in downstream tasks. We propose latent-space language steering, a lightweight inference-time method that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Andrey Goncharov , Nikolai Kondusov , Alexey Zaytsev

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-31 Yuanpu Cao , Tianrong Zhang , Bochuan Cao , Ziyi Yin , Lu Lin , Fenglong Ma , Jinghui Chen

Recent work on activation and latent steering has demonstrated that modifying internal representations can effectively guide large language models (LLMs) toward improved reasoning and efficiency without additional training. However, most…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-07 Tuc Nguyen , Thai Le

Large language models (LLMs) often exhibit undesirable behaviors, such as safety violations and hallucinations. Although inference-time steering offers a cost-effective way to adjust model behavior without updating its parameters, existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-20 Zixuan Weng , Jinghuai Zhang , Kunlin Cai , Ying Li , Peiran Wang , Yuan Tian

Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve remarkable performance through pretraining on extensive data. This enables efficient adaptation to diverse downstream tasks. However, the lack of interpretability in their underlying mechanisms limits…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Xintong Wang , Jingheng Pan , Liang Ding , Longyue Wang , Longqin Jiang , Xingshan Li , Chris Biemann

Large language models can be steered at inference time through prompting or activation interventions, but activation steering methods often underperform compared to prompt-based approaches. We propose a framework that formulates prompt…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-06 Geert Heyman , Frederik Vandeputte

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

Steering language models (LMs) by modifying internal activations is a popular approach for controlling text generation. Unsupervised dictionary learning methods, e.g., sparse autoencoders, can be scaled to produce many steering vectors, but…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-05 Jiuding Sun , Sidharth Baskaran , Zhengxuan Wu , Michael Sklar , Christopher Potts , Atticus Geiger

We present a training-free framework for continuous and controllable image editing at test time for text-conditioned generative models. In contrast to prior approaches that rely on additional training or manual user intervention, we find…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-19 Yigit Ekin , Yossi Gandelsman

We reveal the theoretical foundations of techniques for editing large language models, and present new methods which can do so without requiring retraining. Our theoretical insights show that a single metric (a measure of the intrinsic…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-10-31 Oliver J. Sutton , Qinghua Zhou , Wei Wang , Desmond J. Higham , Alexander N. Gorban , Alexander Bastounis , Ivan Y. Tyukin

Steering vectors (SVs) offer a lightweight way to control large language models (LLMs) at inference time by shifting hidden activations, providing a practical middle ground between prompting and fine-tuning. Yet SVs can be unreliable in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Jiaqian Li , Yanshu Li , Kuan-Hao Huang

Activation steering offers a promising approach to controlling the behavior of Large Language Models by directly manipulating their internal activations. However, most existing methods struggle to jointly steer multiple attributes, often…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Xinyan Jiang , Lin Zhang , Jiayi Zhang , Qingsong Yang , Guimin Hu , Di Wang , Lijie Hu