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Related papers: Steer Like the LLM: Activation Steering that Mimic…

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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

We introduce Mechanistic Error Reduction with Abstention (MERA), a principled framework for steering language models (LMs) to mitigate errors through selective, adaptive interventions. Unlike existing methods that rely on fixed, manually…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-16 Anna Hedström , Salim I. Amoukou , Tom Bewley , Saumitra Mishra , Manuela Veloso

Large language models have demonstrated outstanding performance on a wide range of tasks such as question answering and code generation. On a high level, given an input, a language model can be used to automatically complete the sequence in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-31 Luca Beurer-Kellner , Marc Fischer , Martin Vechev

This research explores strategies for steering the output of large language models (LLMs) towards specific styles, such as sentiment, emotion, or writing style, by adding style vectors to the activations of hidden layers during text…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-05 Kai Konen , Sophie Jentzsch , Diaoulé Diallo , Peer Schütt , Oliver Bensch , Roxanne El Baff , Dominik Opitz , Tobias Hecking

In many real-world applications, users rely on natural language instructions to guide large language models (LLMs) across a wide range of tasks. These instructions are often complex, diverse, and subject to frequent change. However, LLMs do…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Praveen Venkateswaran , Danish Contractor

One of the most common complaints about large language models (LLMs) is their prompt sensitivity -- that is, the fact that their ability to perform a task or provide a correct answer to a question can depend unpredictably on the way the…

In recent years, Recommender Systems (RS) have witnessed a transformative shift with the advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP). Models such as GPT-3.5/4, Llama, have demonstrated…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2024-10-02 Junyi Chen , Toyotaro Suzumura

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

Model steering represents a powerful technique that dynamically aligns large language models (LLMs) with human preferences during inference. However, conventional model-steering methods rely heavily on externally annotated data, not only…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-15 Rongyi Zhu , Yuhui Wang , Tanqiu Jiang , Jiacheng Liang , Ting Wang

Due to rapid advancements in the development of Large Language Models (LLMs), programming these models with prompts has recently gained significant attention. However, the sheer number of available prompt engineering techniques creates an…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-26 Oluwole Fagbohun , Rachel M. Harrison , Anton Dereventsov

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong performance in a wide-range of language tasks without requiring task-specific fine-tuning. However, they remain prone to hallucinations and inconsistencies, and often struggle with…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-27 Matt Pauk , Maria Leonor Pacheco

The performance of large language models (LLMs) is significantly influenced by the quality of the prompts provided. In response, researchers have developed enormous prompt engineering strategies aimed at modifying the prompt text to enhance…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-23 Zhiyuan He , Huiqiang Jiang , Zilong Wang , Yuqing Yang , Luna Qiu , Lili Qiu

Activation steering offers a promising approach to controlling the behavior of Large Language Models by directly manipulating their internal activations. However, most existing methods struggle to jointly steer multiple attributes, often…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Xinyan Jiang , Lin Zhang , Jiayi Zhang , Qingsong Yang , Guimin Hu , Di Wang , Lijie Hu

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) - particularly model scaling and test-time techniques - have greatly enhanced the reasoning capabilities of language models at the expense of higher inference costs. To lower inference costs,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-21 Sangmook Lee , Dohyung Kim , Hyukhun Koh , Nakyeong Yang , Kyomin Jung

Although pretrained language models (PLMs) can be prompted to perform a wide range of language tasks, it remains an open question how much this ability comes from generalizable linguistic understanding versus surface-level lexical patterns.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-23 Terra Blevins , Hila Gonen , Luke Zettlemoyer

Given the prompt "Rome is in", can we steer a language model to flip its prediction of an incorrect token "France" to a correct token "Italy" by only multiplying a few relevant activation vectors with scalars? We argue that successfully…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-08 Niklas Stoehr , Kevin Du , Vésteinn Snæbjarnarson , Robert West , Ryan Cotterell , Aaron Schein

Recently, steering vectors (SVs) have emerged as an effective and lightweight approach to steer behaviors of large language models (LLMs), among which fine-tuned SVs are more effective than optimization-free ones. However, current…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Yuntai Bao , Qinfeng Li , Xinyan Yu , Xuhong Zhang , Ge Su , Wenqi Zhang , Liu Yan , Haiqin Weng , Jianwei Yin

Language model prompt optimization research has shown that semantically and grammatically well-formed manually crafted prompts are routinely outperformed by automatically generated token sequences with no apparent meaning or syntactic…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-25 Corentin Kervadec , Francesca Franzon , Marco Baroni

Speech representations learned from Self-supervised learning (SSL) models can benefit various speech processing tasks. However, utilizing SSL representations usually requires fine-tuning the pre-trained models or designing task-specific…

Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-07-12 Kai-Wei Chang , Wei-Cheng Tseng , Shang-Wen Li , Hung-yi Lee

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