Related papers: Minimizing Collateral Damage in Activation Steerin…

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…

Despite extensive efforts in safety alignment, large language models (LLMs) remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks. Activation steering offers a training-free defense method but relies on fixed steering coefficients, resulting in suboptimal…

Controlling specific behaviors in large language models while preserving their general capabilities is a central challenge for safe and reliable artificial intelligence deployment. Current steering methods, such as vector addition and…

The field of large language models (LLMs) has grown rapidly in recent years, driven by the desire for better efficiency, interpretability, and safe use. Building on the novel approach of "activation engineering," this study explores…

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…

Large language models (LLMs) are costly to deploy due to their large memory footprint and high inference cost. Weight-activation quantization can reduce these costs, but low-bit activation quantization remains difficult because activation…

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate increasing conversational fluency, yet instilling them with nuanced, human-like emotional expression remains a significant challenge. Current alignment techniques often address surface-level output…

Reflection, the ability of large language models (LLMs) to evaluate and revise their own reasoning, has been widely used to improve performance on complex reasoning tasks. Yet, most prior works emphasizes designing reflective prompting…

Linear activation steering is a powerful approach for eliciting the capabilities of large language models and specializing their behavior using limited labeled data. While effective, existing methods often apply a fixed steering strength to…

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 -- adding a vector to a model's residual stream to modify its behavior -- is widely used in safety evaluations as if the model cannot detect the intervention. We test this assumption, introducing steering awareness: a…

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…

Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) have reached remarkable levels of proficiency in understanding multimodal inputs. However, understanding and interpreting the behavior of such complex models is a challenging task, not to mention the dynamic shifts…

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…

Researchers have been studying approaches to steer the behavior of Large Language Models (LLMs) and build personalized LLMs tailored for various applications. While fine-tuning seems to be a direct solution, it requires substantial…

Post-training adaptation of language models is commonly achieved through parameter updates or input-based methods such as fine-tuning, parameter-efficient adaptation, and prompting. In parallel, a growing body of work modifies internal…

Activation Editing, which involves directly editting the internal representations of large language models (LLMs) to alter their behaviors and achieve desired properties, has emerged as a promising area of research. Existing works primarily…

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…

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…

Large language models (LLMs) can be controlled at inference time through prompts (in-context learning) and internal activations (activation steering). Different accounts have been proposed to explain these methods, yet their common goal of…