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Controlling undesirable Large Language Model (LLM) behaviors, such as the generation of unsafe content or failing to adhere to safety guidelines, often relies on costly fine-tuning. Activation steering provides an alternative for…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Amr Hegazy , Mostafa Elhoushi , Amr Alanwar

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,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Soham Gadgil , Chris Lin , Su-In Lee

Activation-based steering enables Large Language Models (LLMs) to exhibit targeted behaviors by intervening on intermediate activations without retraining. Despite its widespread use, the mechanistic factors that govern when steering…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-13 Mehdi Jafari , Hao Xue , Flora Salim

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-28 Quy-Anh Dang , Chris Ngo

Activation steering methods enable inference-time control of large language model (LLM) behavior without retraining, but current approaches face a fundamental trade-off: sample-efficient methods suboptimally capture steering signals from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-09 Kartik Sharma , Rakshit S. Trivedi

The field of mechanistic interpretability in pre-trained transformer models has demonstrated substantial evidence supporting the ''linear representation hypothesis'', which is the idea that high level concepts are encoded as vectors in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-08 Damjan Kalajdzievski

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-23 Jingyuan Yang , Rongjun Li , Weixuan Wang , Ziyu Zhou , Zhiyong Feng , Wei Peng

Activation engineering enables precise control over Large Language Models (LLMs) without the computational cost of fine-tuning. However, existing methods deriving vectors from static activation differences are susceptible to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Xinyan Jiang , Wenjing Yu , Di Wang , Lijie Hu

Alignment in LLMs is more brittle than commonly assumed: misalignment can be triggered by adversarial prompts, benign fine-tuning, emergent misalignment, and goal misgeneralization. Recent evidence suggests that some misalignment behaviors…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-10 Niklas Herbster , Martin Zborowski , Alberto Tosato , Gauthier Gidel , Tommaso Tosato

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-26 Christopher M. Ackerman

Controlling the behaviors of large language models (LLM) is fundamental to their safety alignment and reliable deployment. However, existing steering methods are primarily driven by empirical insights and lack theoretical performance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Dung V. Nguyen , Hieu M. Vu , Nhi Y. Pham , Lei Zhang , Tan M. Nguyen

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Xintong Wang , Jingheng Pan , Liang Ding , Longyue Wang , Longqin Jiang , Xingshan Li , Chris Biemann

Recent advances in automated theorem proving use Large Language Models (LLMs) to translate informal mathematical statements into formal proofs. However, informal cues are often ambiguous or lack strict logical structure, making it hard for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Shashank Kirtania , Arun Iyer

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable capabilities across various tasks, yet guiding them to follow desired behaviours during inference remains a significant challenge. Activation steering offers a promising method to control the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Weixuan Wang , Minghao Wu , Barry Haddow , Alexandra Birch

Large Language Models (LLMs), despite advances in instruction tuning, often fail to follow complex user instructions. Activation steering techniques aim to mitigate this by manipulating model internals, but have a potential risk of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Minjae Kang , Jaehyung Kim

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-08-13 Shivam Dubey

Inference-time steering offers a promising way to control language models (LMs) without retraining. However, standard approaches typically rely on activation addition, which inevitably alters the hidden-state magnitudes raising concerns…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Zejia You , Chunyuan Deng , Hanjie Chen

Large Language Models exhibit implicit personalities in their generation, but reliably controlling or aligning these traits to meet specific needs remains an open challenge. The need for effective mechanisms for behavioural manipulation of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-09 Pranav Bhandari , Nicolas Fay , Sanjeevan Selvaganapathy , Amitava Datta , Usman Naseem , Mehwish Nasim

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-06 Geert Heyman , Frederik Vandeputte

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-03 Amrita Bhattacharjee , Shaona Ghosh , Traian Rebedea , Christopher Parisien
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