Related papers: Global Evolutionary Steering: Refining Activation …
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…
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…
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…
Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable capabilities across various tasks, yet guiding them to follow desired behaviours during inference remains a significant challenge. Activation steering offers a promising method to control the…
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…
Large Language Models (LLMs), despite advances in instruction tuning, often fail to follow complex user instructions. Activation steering techniques aim to mitigate this by manipulating model internals, but have a potential risk of…
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…
Large Language Models (LLMs) hold immense potential to generate synthetic data of high quality and utility, which has numerous applications from downstream model training to practical data utilisation. However, contemporary models, despite…
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 model (LLM) steering has emerged as a promising paradigm for controlling model behavior at inference time through targeted manipulation of hidden states, offering a lightweight alternative to expensive retraining. However,…
The complexity of the real world demands robotic systems that can intelligently adapt to unseen situations. We present STEER, a robot learning framework that bridges high-level, commonsense reasoning with precise, flexible low-level…
Controlling specific behaviors in large language models while preserving their general capabilities is a central challenge for safe and reliable artificial intelligence deployment. Current steering methods, such as vector addition and…
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…
Steering vectors have emerged as a lightweight and effective approach for aligning large language models (LLMs) at inference time, enabling modulation over model behaviors by shifting LLM representations towards a target behavior. However,…
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…
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…
We introduce GIER (Gap-driven Iterative Enhancement of Responses), a general framework for improving large language model (LLM) outputs through self-reflection and revision based on conceptual quality criteria. Unlike prompting strategies…
Activation engineering is becoming increasingly popular as a means of online control of large language models (LLMs). In this work, we extend the idea of inference-time steering with vectors that represent a behavioral direction of interest…
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…
Recent work in activation steering has demonstrated the potential to better control the outputs of Large Language Models (LLMs), but it involves finding steering vectors. This is difficult because engineers do not typically know how…