Related papers: What Drives Representation Steering? A Mechanistic…
This research explores strategies for steering the output of large language models (LLMs) towards specific styles, such as sentiment, emotion, or writing style, by adding style vectors to the activations of hidden layers during text…
Steering, or direct manipulation of internal activations to guide LLM responses toward specific semantic concepts, is emerging as a promising avenue for both understanding how semantic concepts are stored within LLMs and advancing LLM…
Vision Language Models (VLMs) achieve strong performance on multimodal tasks but still suffer from hallucination and safety-related failures that persist even at scale. Steering offers a lightweight technique to improve model performance.…
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…
Steering vectors offer a training-free mechanism for controlling reasoning behaviors in large language models, but constructing effective vectors requires identifying genuine behavioral signals in the model's hidden states. For behaviors…
Activation steering controls LLM behaviour towards target behaviour by intervening in internal representations, yet it often degrades reasoning and retrieval performance. We argue that a primary cause of this trade-off is attention…
Activation steering is a practical post-training model alignment technique to enhance the utility of Large Language Models (LLMs). Prior to deploying a model as a service, developers can steer a pre-trained model toward specific behavioral…
LLMs have shown remarkable capabilities, but precisely controlling their response behavior remains challenging. Existing activation steering methods alter LLM behavior indiscriminately, limiting their practical applicability in settings…
Steering vectors (SVs) have emerged as a promising approach for interpreting and controlling LLMs, but current methods typically require large contrastive datasets that are often impractical to construct and may capture spurious…
Large language models (LLMs) can sometimes detect when they are being evaluated and adjust their behavior to appear more aligned, compromising the reliability of safety evaluations. In this paper, we show that adding a steering vector to an…
As large language models (LLMs) evolve in complexity and capability, the efficacy of less widely deployed alignment techniques are uncertain. Building on previous work on activation steering and contrastive activation addition (CAA), this…
Prior work argues that refusal in large language models is mediated by a single activation-space direction, enabling effective steering and ablation. We show that this account is incomplete. Across eleven categories of refusal and…
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as autonomous decision-makers in strategic settings, yet we have limited tools for understanding their high-level behavioral traits. We use activation steering methods in game-theoretic…
Activation steering is a method for controlling Large Language Model (LLM) behavior by intervening in its internal representations to increase the alignment with a specific target feature direction. However, standard interventions, such as…
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…
Representation Misdirection for Unlearning (RMU), which steers model representation in the intermediate layer to a target random representation, is an effective method for large language model (LLM) unlearning. Despite its high performance,…
Large language models that require multiple GPU cards to host are usually the most capable models. It is necessary to understand and steer these models, but the current technologies do not support the interpretability and steering of these…
While large language models (LLMs) have seen unprecedented advancements in capabilities and applications across a variety of use-cases, safety alignment of these models is still an area of active research. The fragile nature of LLMs, even…
We present a novel approach to bias mitigation in large language models (LLMs) by applying steering vectors to modify model activations in forward passes. We compute 8 steering vectors, each corresponding to a different social bias axis,…
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…