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Student simulation with Large language models (LLMs) offers a scalable alternative for educational research and teacher training. Yet, its validity depends on whether models maintain stable personas across extended interactions. We test…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Jana Gonnermann-Müller , Jennifer Haase , Nicolas Leins , Thomas Kosch , Sebastian Pokutta

Fine-tuning LLMs on benign data can still degrade alignment and adversarial robustness, yet direct analysis of the role of fine-tuning objectives in shaping these safety outcomes remain limited. We present a controlled comparison of six…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Daniel Vennemeyer , Punya Syon Pandey , Phan Anh Duong , Michael Umeokoli , Samuel Ratnam

Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human values and away from undesirable behaviors (such as hallucination) has become increasingly important. Recently, steering LLMs towards a desired behavior via activation editing has emerged as…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-21 Anmol Goel , Yaxi Hu , Iryna Gurevych , Amartya Sanyal

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have made reasoning a central benchmark for evaluating intelligence. While prior surveys focus on efficiency by examining how to shorten reasoning chains or reduce computation, this view…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-01 Chao Wu , Baoheng Li , Mingchen Gao , Yu Tian , Zhenyi Wang

Understanding how large audio models represent music, and using that understanding to steer generation, is both challenging and underexplored. Inspired by mechanistic interpretability in language models, where direction vectors in…

Feature steering has emerged as a promising approach for controlling LLM behavior through direct manipulation of internal representations, offering advantages over prompt engineering. However, its practical effectiveness in real-world…

Activation steering is a promising technique for controlling LLM behavior by adding semantically meaningful vectors directly into a model's hidden states during inference. It is often framed as a precise, interpretable, and potentially…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Anton Korznikov , Andrey Galichin , Alexey Dontsov , Oleg Y. Rogov , Ivan Oseledets , Elena Tutubalina

Understanding and controlling the behavior of large language models (LLMs) is an increasingly important topic in multilingual NLP. Beyond prompting or fine-tuning, , i.e.,~manipulating internal representations during inference, has emerged…

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate an impressive ability to utilise information within the context of their input sequences to appropriately respond to data unseen by the LLM during its training procedure. This ability is known as…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Thomas F Burns , Tomoki Fukai , Christopher J Earls

Backdoor attacks creating 'sleeper agents' in large language models (LLMs) pose significant safety risks. This study employs mechanistic interpretability to explore resulting internal structural differences. Comparing clean Qwen2.5-3B…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-25 Mohammed Abu Baker , Lakshmi Babu-Saheer

Backdoor attacks are a significant threat to the performance and integrity of pre-trained language models. Although such models are routinely fine-tuned for downstream NLP tasks, recent work shows they remain vulnerable to backdoor attacks…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-28 Santosh Chapagain , Shah Muhammad Hamdi , Soukaina Filali Boubrahimi

Language models (LMs) are increasingly used in high-stakes, multi-agent settings, where following instructions and maintaining value alignment are critical. Most alignment research focuses on interactions between a single LM and a single…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Maria Chang , Ronny Luss , Miao Liu , Keerthiram Murugesan , Karthikeyan Ramamurthy , Djallel Bouneffouf

Large Language Models (LLMs) based on the pre-trained fine-tuning paradigm have become pivotal in solving natural language processing tasks, consistently achieving state-of-the-art performance. Nevertheless, the theoretical understanding of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-02 Jing Luo , Huiyuan Wang , Weiran Huang

The high power consumption and latency-sensitive deployments of large language models (LLMs) have motivated efficiency techniques like quantization and sparsity. Contextual sparsity, where the sparsity pattern is input-dependent, is crucial…

Multimodal large language models can exhibit text dominance, over-relying on linguistic priors instead of grounding predictions in non-text inputs. One example is large audio-language models (LALMs) where decisive audio evidence can be…

Sound · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Neta Glazer , Lenny Aharon , Ethan Fetaya

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities, yet their deployment is frequently undermined by undesirable behaviors such as generating harmful content, factual inaccuracies, and societal biases. Diagnosing the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-06 Zhe Li , Wei Zhao , Yige Li , Jun Sun

Large language models (LLMs) are trained through multi-stage pipelines over heterogeneous data sources, yet developers lack a principled way to pinpoint the specific data responsible for an observed behavior. This lack of observability…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-19 Wenjie Jacky Mo , Qin Liu , Xiaofei Wen , Wenxuan Zhou , Zhe Zhao , Muhao Chen

Long-context large language models (LLMs) are prone to be distracted by irrelevant contexts. The reason for distraction remains poorly understood. In this paper, we first identify the contextual heads, a special group of attention heads…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-01 Youxiang Zhu , Ruochen Li , Danqing Wang , Daniel Haehn , Xiaohui Liang

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-15 Alessandro Stolfo , Vidhisha Balachandran , Safoora Yousefi , Eric Horvitz , Besmira Nushi

In many real-world applications, users rely on natural language instructions to guide large language models (LLMs) across a wide range of tasks. These instructions are often complex, diverse, and subject to frequent change. However, LLMs do…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Praveen Venkateswaran , Danish Contractor