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Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with specific personas typically relies on expensive and monolithic Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) or RLHF. While effective, these methods require training distinct models for every target personality…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Florian Hoppe , David Khachaturov , Robert Mullins , Mark Huasong Meng

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

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

Precise control over language model generation is vital for ensuring both safety and reliability. Although prompt engineering and steering are commonly used to intervene in model behaviors, the vast number of parameters in models often…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Mengru Wang , Ziwen Xu , Shengyu Mao , Shumin Deng , Zhaopeng Tu , Huajun Chen , Ningyu Zhang

Controlling stylistic attributes in large language models (LLMs) remains challenging, with existing approaches relying on either prompt engineering or post-training alignment. This paper investigates this challenge through the lens of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Zhenyu Xu , Victor S. Sheng

Steering, or direct manipulation of internal activations to guide LLM responses toward specific semantic concepts, is emerging as a promising avenue for both understanding how semantic concepts are stored within LLMs and advancing LLM…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Parmida Davarmanesh , Ashia Wilson , Adityanarayanan Radhakrishnan

Language and vision-language models have shown impressive performance across a wide range of tasks, but their internal mechanisms remain only partly understood. In this work, we study how individual attention heads in text-generative models…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-01-15 Lorenzo Basile , Valentino Maiorca , Diego Doimo , Francesco Locatello , Alberto Cazzaniga

Where should we intervene in a language model (LM) to localize and control behaviors that are diffused across many tokens of a long-form response? We introduce Generative Causal Mediation (GCM), a procedure for selecting model components…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Aruna Sankaranarayanan , Amir Zur , Atticus Geiger , Dylan Hadfield-Menell

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

Controlling multiple behavioral attributes in large language models (LLMs) at inference time is a challenging problem due to interference between attributes and the limitations of linear steering methods, which assume additive behavior in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Narmeen Oozeer , Luke Marks , Shreyans Jain , Fazl Barez , Amirali Abdullah

Robust alignment guardrails for large language models (LLMs) are becoming increasingly important with their widespread application. In contrast to previous studies, we demonstrate that inference-time activation interventions can bypass…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-26 Paul Darm , Annalisa Riccardi

Large Language Models (LLMs) often rely on long chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning to solve complex tasks. While effective, these trajectories are frequently inefficient, leading to high latency from excessive token generation, or unstable…

The memorization of training data by Large Language Models (LLMs) poses significant risks, including privacy leaks and the regurgitation of copyrighted content. Activation steering, a technique that directly intervenes in model activations,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-11 Manan Suri , Nishit Anand , Amisha Bhaskar

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

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Sumanta Bhattacharyya , Pedram Rooshenas

As the development and application of Large Language Models (LLMs) continue to advance rapidly, enhancing their trustworthiness and aligning them with human preferences has become a critical area of research. Traditional methods rely…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-06 Yuxin Xiao , Chaoqun Wan , Yonggang Zhang , Wenxiao Wang , Binbin Lin , Xiaofei He , Xu Shen , Jieping Ye

Large Language Models exhibit implicit personalities in their generation, but reliably controlling or aligning these traits to meet specific needs remains an open challenge. The need for effective mechanisms for behavioural manipulation of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-09 Pranav Bhandari , Nicolas Fay , Sanjeevan Selvaganapathy , Amitava Datta , Usman Naseem , Mehwish Nasim

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-28 Quy-Anh Dang , Chris Ngo

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

Discrete diffusion language models (DLMs) generate text by iteratively denoising all positions in parallel, offering an alternative to autoregressive models. Controlled generation methods for DLMs, imported from autoregressive models, apply…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Hanhan Zhou , Shamik Roy , Rashmi Gangadharaiah
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