Related papers: What Drives Representation Steering? A Mechanistic…
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…
Activation steering -- adding a vector to a model's residual stream to modify its behavior -- is widely used in safety evaluations as if the model cannot detect the intervention. We test this assumption, introducing steering awareness: a…
Steering vectors have emerged as a lightweight and effective approach for aligning large language models (LLMs) at inference time, enabling modulation over model behaviors by shifting LLM representations towards a target behavior. However,…
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,…
Activation engineering is becoming increasingly popular as a means of online control of large language models (LLMs). In this work, we extend the idea of inference-time steering with vectors that represent a behavioral direction of interest…
Despite the remarkable success of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) across diverse tasks, the internal mechanisms governing how they encode and ground distinct visual concepts remain poorly understood. To bridge this gap, we propose…
A key objective of interpretability research on large language models (LLMs) is to develop methods for robustly steering models toward desired behaviors. To this end, two distinct approaches to interpretability -- ``bottom-up" and…
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…
Large language models (LLMs) have transformed the way we access information. These models are often tuned to refuse to comply with requests that are considered harmful and to produce responses that better align with the preferences of those…
Activation steering presupposes that task-relevant behaviors correspond to linear directions in activation space -- directions that should both steer the model and be readable along the unembedding. Function vectors (FVs), extracted as mean…
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…
Steering vectors (SVs) offer a lightweight way to control large language models (LLMs) at inference time by shifting hidden activations, providing a practical middle ground between prompting and fine-tuning. Yet SVs can be unreliable in…
Large language models can be steered at inference time through prompting or activation interventions, but activation steering methods often underperform compared to prompt-based approaches. We propose a framework that formulates prompt…
A popular approach to post-training control of large language models (LLMs) is the steering of intermediate latent representations. Namely, identify a well-chosen direction depending on the task at hand and perturbs representations along…
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…
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…
As large language models (LLMs) become more integrated into societal systems, the risk of them perpetuating and amplifying harmful biases becomes a critical safety concern. Traditional methods for mitigating bias often rely on data…
Large language models (LLMs) are able to generate grammatically well-formed text, but how do they encode their syntactic knowledge internally? While prior work has focused largely on binary grammatical contrasts, in this work, we study the…
Steering methods have emerged as effective and targeted tools for guiding large language models' (LLMs) behavior without modifying their parameters. Multimodal large language models (MLLMs), however, do not currently enjoy the same suite of…
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…