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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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Anton Korznikov , Andrey Galichin , Alexey Dontsov , Oleg Y. Rogov , Ivan Oseledets , Elena Tutubalina

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance across many generation tasks. Nevertheless, effectively aligning them with desired behaviors remains a significant challenge. Activation steering is an effective and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Zifeng Cheng , Jinwei Gan , Zhiwei Jiang , Cong Wang , Yafeng Yin , Xiang Luo , Yuchen Fu , Qing Gu

This paper presents a novel approach to enhance autonomous robotic manipulation using the Large Language Model (LLM) for logical inference, converting high-level language commands into sequences of executable motion functions. The proposed…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-08-30 Haokun Liu , Yaonan Zhu , Kenji Kato , Izumi Kondo , Tadayoshi Aoyama , Yasuhisa Hasegawa

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-18 Xinyu Tang , Zhihao Lv , Xiaoxue Cheng , Junyi Li , Wayne Xin Zhao , Zujie Wen , Zhiqiang Zhang , Jun Zhou

Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with specific personas typically relies on expensive and monolithic Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) or RLHF. While effective, these methods require training distinct models for every target personality…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Florian Hoppe , David Khachaturov , Robert Mullins , Mark Huasong Meng

As the development and application of Large Language Models (LLMs) continue to advance rapidly, enhancing their trustworthiness and aligning them with human preferences has become a critical area of research. Traditional methods rely…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-06 Yuxin Xiao , Chaoqun Wan , Yonggang Zhang , Wenxiao Wang , Binbin Lin , Xiaofei He , Xu Shen , Jieping Ye

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit reasoning biases, often conflating content plausibility with formal logical validity. This can lead to wrong inferences in critical domains, where plausible arguments are incorrectly deemed logically…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Marco Valentino , Geonhee Kim , Dhairya Dalal , Zhixue Zhao , André Freitas

Activation steering methods control large language model (LLM) behavior by modifying internal activations at inference time. However, most existing activation steering methods rely on a fixed steering strength, leading to either…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-16 Arthur Vogels , Benjamin Wong , Yann Choho , Annabelle Blangero , Milan Bhan

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…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-10-31 Anushka Sivakumar , Andrew Zhang , Zaber Hakim , Chris Thomas

Inference-time steering aims to alter a large language model's (LLM's) responses without changing its parameters, but a central challenge is identifying the internal modules that most strongly govern the target behavior. Existing approaches…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Li-Ming Zhan , Bo Liu , Chengqiang Xie , Jiannong Cao , Xiao-Ming Wu

Controlling multiple behavioral attributes in large language models (LLMs) at inference time is a challenging problem due to interference between attributes and the limitations of linear steering methods, which assume additive behavior in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Narmeen Oozeer , Luke Marks , Shreyans Jain , Fazl Barez , Amirali Abdullah

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-30 Md Mahbubur Rahman , Arjun Guha , Harshitha Menon

Activation steering methods in large language models (LLMs) have emerged as an effective way to perform targeted updates to enhance generated language without requiring large amounts of adaptation data. We ask whether the features…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-05 Masha Fedzechkina , Eleonora Gualdoni , Sinead Williamson , Katherine Metcalf , Skyler Seto , Barry-John Theobald

Discrete Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) offer a promising non-autoregressive alternative for text generation, yet effective mechanisms for inference-time control remain relatively underexplored. Existing approaches include sampling-level…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Eden Avrahami , Eliya Nachmani

Despite significant progress in transformer interpretability, an understanding of the computational mechanisms of large language models (LLMs) remains a fundamental challenge. Many approaches interpret a network's hidden representations but…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-14 James R. Golden

Modern language models (LMs) have significantly advanced generative modeling in natural language processing (NLP). Despite their success, LMs often struggle with adaptation to new contexts in real-time applications. A promising approach to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-11 Hieu Trung Nguyen , Bao Nguyen , Binh Nguyen , Viet Anh Nguyen

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Jiaqian Li , Yanshu Li , Kuan-Hao Huang

Recent work on domain-specific reasoning with large language models (LLMs) often relies on training-intensive approaches that require parameter updates. While activation steering has emerged as a parameter efficient alternative, existing…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Wencheng Ye , Xiaoyang Yuan , Yi Bin , Pengpeng Zeng , Hengyu Jin , Liang Peng , Heng Tao Shen

Activation steering, or representation engineering, offers a lightweight approach to align large language models (LLMs) by manipulating their internal activations at inference time. However, current methods suffer from two key limitations:…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Hongjue Zhao , Haosen Sun , Jiangtao Kong , Xiaochang Li , Qineng Wang , Liwei Jiang , Qi Zhu , Tarek Abdelzaher , Yejin Choi , Manling Li , Huajie Shao

We present Fusion Steering, an activation steering methodology that improves factual accuracy in large language models (LLMs) for question-answering (QA) tasks. This approach introduces flexible steering configurations, including full-layer…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Waldemar Chang , Alhassan Yasin