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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

Vision Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in integrating visual and textual information for understanding and reasoning, but remain highly vulnerable to adversarial attacks. While activation steering has…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Sihao Wu , Gaojie Jin , Wei Huang , Jianhong Wang , Xiaowei Huang

Steering has emerged as a practical approach to enable post-hoc guidance of LLMs towards enforcing a specific behavior. However, it remains largely underexplored for multimodal LLMs (MLLMs); furthermore, existing steering techniques, such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Jayneel Parekh , Pegah Khayatan , Mustafa Shukor , Arnaud Dapogny , Alasdair Newson , Matthieu Cord

Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely used for automated code generation, yet their apparent successes often mask a tension between pretraining objectives and alignment choices. While pretraining encourages models to exploit all available…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-12-25 Oussama Ben Sghaier , Kevin Delcourt , Houari Sahraoui

Steering large language models (LLMs) is usually done by either instruction prompting or activation steering. Prompting often gives strong control, but caches guidance tokens at every layer and can clutter long interactions; activation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Andy Zeyi Liu , Michael Zhang , Ilana Greenberg , Adam Alnasser , Lucas Baker , John Sous

We demonstrate experimental results with LLMs that address robotics task planning problems. Recently, LLMs have been applied in robotics task planning, particularly using a code generation approach that converts complex high-level…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-04-09 Yusuke Mikami , Andrew Melnik , Jun Miura , Ville Hautamäki

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success, yet aligning their generations with human preferences remains a critical challenge. Existing approaches to preference modeling often rely on an explicit or implicit reward…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-09 Zhuocheng Gong , Jian Guan , Wei Wu , Huishuai Zhang , Dongyan Zhao

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

Large Language Models (LLMs) have showcased remarkable capabilities in following human instructions. However, recent studies have raised concerns about the robustness of LLMs when prompted with instructions combining textual adversarial…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-27 Yuansen Zhang , Xiao Wang , Zhiheng Xi , Han Xia , Tao Gui , Qi Zhang , Xuanjing Huang

A key challenge in AI alignment is guiding large language models (LLMs) to follow desired behaviors at test time. Activation steering, which modifies internal model activations during inference, offers a potential solution. However, prior…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Reza Bayat , Ali Rahimi-Kalahroudi , Mohammad Pezeshki , Sarath Chandar , Pascal Vincent

Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate functional source code from natural-language prompts, but often fail to consistently follow higher-level architectural structures or design patterns. Since LLMs are increasingly used in software…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Viktor Kjellberg , Farnaz Fotrousi , Miroslaw Staron

Reasoning is a fundamental component of language understanding. Recent prompting techniques, such as chain of thought, have consistently improved LLMs' performance on various reasoning tasks. Nevertheless, there is still little…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-01 Haritz Puerto , Martin Tutek , Somak Aditya , Xiaodan Zhu , Iryna Gurevych

This paper investigates how large language models (LLMs) behave when faced with discrepancies between their parametric knowledge and conflicting information contained in a prompt. Building on prior question-answering (QA) research, we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-23 Jaesung Bae , Cameron Churchwell , Mitchell Hermon , Tsun-An Hsieh , Jocelyn Xu , Yekaterina Yegorova , Mark Hasegawa-Johnson , Heng Ji

Large Language Models (LLMs) often exhibit homogenized cultural perspectives. While the World Values Survey (WVS) provides a gold standard for mapping human values, traditional direct prompting of LLMs on WVS often fails to access the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Trung Duc Anh Dang , Sarah Masud

Natural language remains the predominant way people interact with large language models (LLMs). However, users often struggle to precisely express and control subjective preferences (e.g., tone, style, and emphasis) through prompting. We…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Chao Zhang , Yiren Liu , Lunyiu Nie , Jeffrey M. Rzeszotarski , Yun Huang , Tal August

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to generate multiple-choice questions (MCQs), where correct answers should ideally be uniformly distributed across options. However, we observe that LLMs exhibit systematic position biases…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Xuemei Tang , Xufeng Duan , Zhenguang G. Cai

Software systems usually provide numerous configuration options that can affect performance metrics such as execution time, memory usage, binary size, or bitrate. On the one hand, making informed decisions is challenging and requires domain…

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

Recent work has demonstrated the potential of contrastive steering for jailbreaking Large Language Models (LLMs). However, existing methods rely on limited and inherently biased contrastive prompts and require laborious manual tuning of…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Junxi Chen , Junhao Dong , Xiaohua Xie

Latent space steering methods provide a practical approach to controlling large language models by applying steering vectors to intermediate activations, guiding outputs toward desired behaviors while avoiding retraining. Despite their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Shawn Im , Sharon Li