Related papers: Activation Steering for Aligned Open-ended Generat…

The deployment of large language models (LLMs) raises significant ethical and safety concerns. While LLM alignment techniques are adopted to improve model safety and trustworthiness, adversaries can exploit these techniques to undermine…

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate increasing conversational fluency, yet instilling them with nuanced, human-like emotional expression remains a significant challenge. Current alignment techniques often address surface-level output…

Current methods for content safety in Large Language Models (LLMs), such as Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), often rely on multi-stage training pipelines and lack fine-grained,…

Large language models (LLMs) often encode cognitive behaviors unpredictably across prompts, layers, and contexts, making them difficult to diagnose and control. We present CBMAS, a diagnostic framework for continuous activation steering,…

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…

Large language models (LLMs) can be controlled at inference time through prompts (in-context learning) and internal activations (activation steering). Different accounts have been proposed to explain these methods, yet their common goal of…

Multilingual Large Language Models (LLMs) often exhibit hallucinations such as unintended code-switching, reducing reliability in downstream tasks. We propose latent-space language steering, a lightweight inference-time method that…

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…

Beyond simple text generation, Large Language Models (LLMs) have evolved into agentic systems capable of planning and interacting with external tools to solve complex tasks. This evolution involves fine-tuning LLMs on agent-specific tasks…

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit impressive capabilities in generation tasks but are prone to producing harmful, misleading, or biased content, posing significant ethical and safety concerns. To mitigate such risks, representation…

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…

Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive abilities in leveraging pretrained knowledge through prompting, but they often struggle with unseen tasks, particularly in data-scarce scenarios. While cross-task in-context learning offers…

Steering vectors are a lightweight method for controlling language model behavior by adding a learned bias to the activations at inference time. Although effective on average, steering effect sizes vary across samples and are unreliable for…

Large language models (LLMs) often require fine-tuning (FT) to perform well on downstream tasks, but FT can induce safety-alignment drift even when the training dataset contains only benign data. Prior work shows that introducing a small…

Adapting models to a language that was only partially present in the pre-training data requires fine-tuning, which is expensive in terms of both data and computational resources. As an alternative to fine-tuning, we explore the potential of…

Large language models have transformed AI, yet reliably controlling their outputs remains a challenge. This paper explores activation engineering, where outputs of pre-trained LLMs are controlled by manipulating their activations at…

Complex social behaviors, such as empathy and strategic politeness, are widely assumed to resist the directional decomposition that makes activation steering effective for coarse attributes like sentiment or toxicity. We present STAR:…

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) exhibit human-like cognitive reasoning strategies (e.g. backtracking, cross-verification) during reasoning process, which improves their performance on complex tasks. Currently, reasoning strategies are…

This paper investigates privacy jailbreaking in LLMs via steering, focusing on whether manipulating activations can bypass LLM alignment and alter response behaviors to privacy related queries (e.g., a certain public figure's sexual…

Linear activation steering is a powerful approach for eliciting the capabilities of large language models and specializing their behavior using limited labeled data. While effective, existing methods often apply a fixed steering strength to…