Related papers: Conceptors for Semantic Steering
Steering vectors are a promising approach to aligning language model behavior at inference time. In this paper, we propose a framework to assess the limitations of steering vectors as alignment mechanisms. Using a framework of transformer…
Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) provide a basis for semantic abstractions within a neural network architecture. Such models have primarily been seen through the lens of interpretability so far, wherein they offer transparency by inferring…
Having an LLM that aligns with human preferences is essential for accommodating individual needs, such as maintaining writing style or generating specific topics of interest. The majority of current alignment methods rely on fine-tuning or…
As large language models (LLMs) become widely deployed, concerns about their safety and alignment grow. An approach to steer LLM behavior, such as mitigating biases or defending against jailbreaks, is to identify which parts of a prompt…
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…
Despite the remarkable success of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) across diverse tasks, the internal mechanisms governing how they encode and ground distinct visual concepts remain poorly understood. To bridge this gap, we propose…
Steering methods influence Large Language Model behavior by identifying semantic directions in hidden representations, but are typically realized through inference-time activation interventions that apply a fixed, global modification to the…
Recent advances in Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in solving complex tasks such as mathematics and coding. However, these models frequently exhibit a phenomenon known as overthinking during…
Recent work has shown that LLMs can sometimes detect when steering vectors are injected into their residual stream and identify the injected concept -- a phenomenon termed "introspective awareness." We investigate the mechanisms underlying…
Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) excel at complex reasoning tasks, but their efficiency is often hampered by overly verbose outputs. Prior steering methods attempt to address this issue by applying a single, global vector to hidden…
This work characterizes large language models' chain-of-thought generation as a structured trajectory through representation space. We show that mathematical reasoning traverses functionally ordered, step-specific subspaces that become…
Understanding how large audio models represent music, and using that understanding to steer generation, is both challenging and underexplored. Inspired by mechanistic interpretability in language models, where direction vectors in…
Sparse autoencoders have become a standard tool for uncovering interpretable latent representations in neural networks. Yet salient concepts often span manifolds that current linear methods cannot capture without post hoc analysis. This…
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…
Large language models handle single-turn generation well, but multi-turn interactions still require the model to reconstruct user intent and task state from an expanding token history because internal representations do not persist across…
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…
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:…
Concept-based models perform prediction using a set of concepts that are interpretable to stakeholders. However, such models often involve a fixed, large number of concepts, which may place a substantial cognitive load on stakeholders. We…
There has been considerable recent interest in interpretable concept-based models such as Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs), which first predict human-interpretable concepts and then map them to output classes. To reduce reliance on…
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…