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Controlling undesirable Large Language Model (LLM) behaviors, such as the generation of unsafe content or failing to adhere to safety guidelines, often relies on costly fine-tuning. Activation steering provides an alternative for…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Amr Hegazy , Mostafa Elhoushi , Amr Alanwar

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 control large language model (LLM) behavior by modifying internal activations at inference time. However, most existing activation steering methods rely on a fixed steering strength, leading to either…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-16 Arthur Vogels , Benjamin Wong , Yann Choho , Annabelle Blangero , Milan Bhan

The field of large language models (LLMs) has grown rapidly in recent years, driven by the desire for better efficiency, interpretability, and safe use. Building on the novel approach of "activation engineering," this study explores…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-26 Rumi Allbert , James K. Wiles , Vlad Grankovsky

Driven by the demand for personalized AI systems, there is growing interest in aligning the behavior of large language models (LLMs) with human traits such as personality. Previous attempts to induce personality in LLMs have shown promising…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-25 Seungjong Sun , Seo Yeon Baek , Jang Hyun Kim

Large language models (LLMs) excel at mathematical reasoning and logical problem-solving. The current popular training paradigms primarily use supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL) to enhance the models' reasoning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Jack Chen , Fazhong Liu , Naruto Liu , Yuhan Luo , Erqu Qin , Harry Zheng , Tian Dong , Haojin Zhu , Yan Meng , Xiao Wang

Inference-time LLM alignment methods, particularly activation steering, offer an alternative to fine-tuning by directly modifying activations during generation. Existing methods, however, often rely on non-anticipative interventions that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-22 Julian Skifstad , Xinyue Annie Yang , Glen Chou

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

Large language models (LLMs) excel at handling human queries, but they can occasionally generate flawed or unexpected responses. Understanding their internal states is crucial for understanding their successes, diagnosing their failures,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-24 Xuansheng Wu , Jiayi Yuan , Wenlin Yao , Xiaoming Zhai , Ninghao Liu

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…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-11-24 Zhiyuan Xu , Stanislav Abaimov , Joseph Gardiner , Sana Belguith

As Large Language Models increasingly automate complex, long-horizon tasks such as \emph{vibe coding}, a supervision gap has emerged. While models excel at execution, users often struggle to guide them effectively due to insufficient domain…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-09 Enyu Zhou , Zhiheng Xi , Long Ma , Zhihao Zhang , Shihan Dou , Zhikai Lei , Guoteng Wang , Rui Zheng , Hang Yan , Tao Gui , Qi Zhang , Xuanjing Huang

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

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance across many tasks, yet aligning them with desired behaviors remains challenging. Activation intervention has emerged as an effective and economical method to modify the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-26 Weixuan Wang , Jingyuan Yang , Wei Peng

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

Personality steering in large language models (LLMs) commonly relies on injecting trait-specific steering vectors, implicitly assuming that personality traits can be controlled independently. In this work, we examine whether this assumption…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-19 Pranav Bhandari , Usman Naseem , Mehwish Nasim

Recent work in Mechanistic Interpretability (MI) has enabled the identification and intervention of internal features in Large Language Models (LLMs). However, a persistent challenge lies in linking such internal features to the reliable…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-08 Ruikang Zhang , Shuo Wang , Qi Su

We present Big5-Scaler, a prompt-based framework for conditioning large language models (LLMs) with controllable Big Five personality traits. By embedding numeric trait values into natural language prompts, our method enables fine-grained…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-11 Gunhee Cho , Yun-Gyung Cheong

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) exhibit impressive capabilities in generation tasks but are prone to producing harmful, misleading, or biased content, posing significant ethical and safety concerns. To mitigate such risks, representation…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-11-17 Zeqing He , Zhibo Wang , Huiyu Xu , Hejun Lin , Wenhui Zhang , Zhixuan Chu

Despite the success of Instruction Tuning (IT) in training large language models (LLMs), such models often leverage spurious or biased features learnt from their training data and can become misaligned, leading to undesired behaviours.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Tom A. Lamb , Adam Davies , Alasdair Paren , Philip H. S. Torr , Francesco Pinto