English
Related papers

Related papers: Steering Code LLMs with Activation Directions for …

200 papers

There is a growing concern about the environmental impact of large language models (LLMs) in software development, particularly due to their high energy use and carbon footprint. Small Language Models (SLMs) offer a more sustainable…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-10-08 Humza Ashraf , Syed Muhammad Danish , Shadikur Rahman , Zeeshan Sattar

Steering vectors are a promising approach to aligning language model behavior at inference time. In this paper, we propose a framework to assess the limitations of steering vectors as alignment mechanisms. Using a framework of transformer…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-05 Chebrolu Niranjan , Kokil Jaidka , Gerard Christopher Yeo

Recent advances in automated theorem proving use Large Language Models (LLMs) to translate informal mathematical statements into formal proofs. However, informal cues are often ambiguous or lack strict logical structure, making it hard for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Shashank Kirtania , Arun Iyer

Code data has been shown to enhance the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), but it remains unclear which aspects of code are most responsible. We investigate this question with a systematic, data-centric framework. We…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Abdul Waheed , Zhen Wu , Carolyn Rosé , Daphne Ippolito

Instruction-tuned Language Models (ILMs) have become essential components of modern AI systems, demonstrating exceptional versatility across natural language and reasoning tasks. Among their most impactful applications is code generation,…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-02-18 Zaiyu Cheng , Antonio Mastropaolo

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly expected to handle complex decision-making tasks, yet their ability to perform structured resource allocation remains underexplored. Evaluating their reasoning is also difficult due to data…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-08-11 Sankarshan Damle , Boi Faltings

Binary vulnerability analysis is increasingly performed by LLM-based agents in an iterative, multi-pass manner, with the model as the core decision-maker. However, how such systems organize exploration over hundreds of reasoning steps…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Qiang Li , XiangRui Zhang , Haining Wang

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) 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

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

Reflection, the ability of large language models (LLMs) to evaluate and revise their own reasoning, has been widely used to improve performance on complex reasoning tasks. Yet, most prior works emphasizes designing reflective prompting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-12 Fu-Chieh Chang , Yu-Ting Lee , Pei-Yuan Wu

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have led to the development of thinking language models that generate extensive internal reasoning chains before producing responses. While these models achieve improved performance,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-23 Constantin Venhoff , Iván Arcuschin , Philip Torr , Arthur Conmy , Neel Nanda

Activation-based control steers large language models (LLMs) by intervening on their internal representations during inference, and has emerged as an effective paradigm for controlling behaviors such as persona and style. However, existing…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Yingdong Shi , Ruiming Zhang , Changming Li , Zhiyu Yang , Kaixing Zhang , Jingyi Yu , Kan Ren

Programmers increasingly rely on Large Language Models (LLMs) for code generation. However, misalignment between programmers' goals and generated code complicates the code evaluation process and demands frequent switching between prompt…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-12-27 Ryan Yen , Jiawen Zhu , Sangho Suh , Haijun Xia , Jian Zhao

Alignment in LLMs is more brittle than commonly assumed: misalignment can be triggered by adversarial prompts, benign fine-tuning, emergent misalignment, and goal misgeneralization. Recent evidence suggests that some misalignment behaviors…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-10 Niklas Herbster , Martin Zborowski , Alberto Tosato , Gauthier Gidel , Tommaso Tosato

Multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable success on complex multi-modal tasks. However, it remains insufficiently explored whether they exhibit $\textbf{modality preference}$, a tendency to favor one modality over…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-05 Yu Zhang , Jinlong Ma , Yongshuai Hou , Xuefeng Bai , Kehai Chen , Yang Xiang , Jun Yu , Min Zhang

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit distinct and consistent personalities that greatly impact trust and engagement. While this means that personality frameworks would be highly valuable tools to characterize and control LLMs' behavior,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-19 Michel Frising , Daniel Balcells

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

Code language models excel on code intelligence tasks, yet their internal interpretability is underexplored. Existing neuron interpretability techniques from NLP are suboptimal for source code due to programming languages formal,…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Zhe Yin , Xiaodong Gu , Beijun Shen

Applying steering vectors to large language models (LLMs) is an efficient and effective model alignment technique, but we lack an interpretable explanation for how it works-- specifically, what internal mechanisms steering vectors affect…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-10 Stephen Cheng , Sarah Wiegreffe , Dinesh Manocha