Related papers: What Drives Representation Steering? A Mechanistic…
Steering language models (LMs) by modifying internal activations is a popular approach for controlling text generation. Unsupervised dictionary learning methods, e.g., sparse autoencoders, can be scaled to produce many steering vectors, but…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely used by software engineers for programming tasks. However, research shows that LLMs often lack a deep understanding of program semantics. Even minor changes to syntax, such as renaming variables, can…
Vision Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly being used in a broad range of applications, bringing their security and behavioral control to the forefront. While existing approaches for behavioral control or output redirection, like system…
Despite the recent success of instruction-tuned language models and their ubiquitous usage, very little is known of how models process instructions internally. In this work, we address this gap from a mechanistic point of view by…
It is a critical challenge to efficiently unlock the powerful reasoning potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) for specific tasks or new distributions. Existing test-time adaptation methods often require tuning model parameters, which is…
The influence of personas on Large Language Models (LLMs) has been widely studied, yet their direct impact on performance remains uncertain. This work explores a novel approach to guiding LLM behaviour through role vectors, an alternative…
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…
We introduce Refusal Steering, an inference-time method to exercise fine-grained control over Large Language Models refusal behaviour on politically sensitive topics without retraining. We replace fragile pattern-based refusal detection…
We address the challenge of societal bias in Large Language Models (LLMs), focusing on the Llama 2 7B Chat model. As LLMs are increasingly integrated into decision-making processes with substantial societal impact, it becomes imperative to…
Representation steering offers a lightweight mechanism for controlling the behavior of large language models (LLMs) by intervening on internal activations at inference time. Most existing methods rely on a single global steering direction,…
Code LLMs often default to particular programming languages and libraries under neutral prompts. We investigate whether these preferences are encoded as approximately linear directions in activation space that can be manipulated at…
This work introduces SteerVLM, a lightweight steering module designed to guide Vision-Language Models (VLMs) towards outputs that better adhere to desired instructions. Our approach learns from the latent embeddings of paired prompts…
Activation steering has emerged as a promising approach for efficiently adapting large language models (LLMs) to downstream behaviors. However, most existing steering methods rely on a single static direction per task or concept, making…
Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve remarkable performance through pretraining on extensive data. This enables efficient adaptation to diverse downstream tasks. However, the lack of interpretability in their underlying mechanisms limits…
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…
We propose cache steering, a lightweight method for implicit steering of language models via a one-shot intervention applied directly to the key-value cache. To validate its effectiveness, we apply cache steering to induce chain-of-thought…
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…
Controlling the behavior of Large Language Models (LLMs) remains a significant challenge due to their inherent complexity and opacity. While techniques like fine-tuning can modify model behavior, they typically require extensive…
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…
Recent advances in mechanistic interpretability have revealed that large language models (LLMs) develop internal representations corresponding not only to concrete entities but also distinct, human-understandable abstract concepts and…