Related papers: Contextual Linear Activation Steering of Language …
Activation-based control steers large language models (LLMs) by intervening on their internal representations during inference, and has emerged as an effective paradigm for controlling behaviors such as persona and style. However, existing…
Activation steering methods were shown to be effective in conditioning language model generation by additively intervening over models' intermediate representations. However, the evaluation of these techniques has so far been limited to…
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…
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…
Large language models (LLMs) require precise behavior control for safe and effective deployment across diverse applications. Activation steering offers a promising approach for LLMs' behavioral control. We focus on the question of how…
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…
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…
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…
Modern large language models (LLMs) are typically secured by auditing data, prompts, and refusal policies, while treating the forward pass as an implementation detail. We show that intermediate activations in decoder-only LLMs form a…
Activation steering provides parameter-efficient control over large language models (LLMs) at inference time, but many methods rely on off-distribution supervision and discrete masking, leading to brittle interventions. We propose ROAST…
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…
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…
We introduce Contrastive Activation Addition (CAA), an innovative method for steering language models by modifying their activations during forward passes. CAA computes "steering vectors" by averaging the difference in residual stream…
Understanding and controlling the behavior of large language models (LLMs) is an increasingly important topic in multilingual NLP. Beyond prompting or fine-tuning, , i.e.,~manipulating internal representations during inference, has emerged…
Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance across many tasks, yet aligning them with desired behaviors remains challenging. Activation intervention has emerged as an effective and economical method to modify the…
Language agents have become a promising solution to complex interactive tasks. One of the key ingredients to the success of language agents is the reward model on the trajectory of the agentic workflow, which provides valuable guidance…
Controlling the behavior of large language models (LLMs) at inference time is essential for aligning outputs with human abilities and safety requirements. \emph{Activation steering} provides a lightweight alternative to prompt engineering…
The increasing capabilities of large generative models and their ever more widespread deployment have raised concerns about their reliability, safety, and potential misuse. To address these issues, recent works have proposed to control…
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…
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…