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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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-13 Eric Bigelow , Daniel Wurgaft , YingQiao Wang , Noah Goodman , Tomer Ullman , Hidenori Tanaka , Ekdeep Singh Lubana

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

Recent advances in automated theorem proving use Large Language Models (LLMs) to translate informal mathematical statements into formal proofs. However, informal cues are often ambiguous or lack strict logical structure, making it hard for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Shashank Kirtania , Arun Iyer

Steering vectors work for some concepts and layers but fail for others, and practitioners have no way to predict which setting applies before running an intervention. We introduce the Linear Accessibility Profile (LAP), a per-layer…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-20 Jayadev Billa

Safety alignment is indispensable for Large Language Models (LLMs) to defend threats from malicious instructions. However, recent researches reveal safety-aligned LLMs prone to reject benign queries due to the exaggerated safety issue,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-12-18 Zouying Cao , Yifei Yang , Hai Zhao

Generalized policy and execution efficiency constitute the two critical challenges in robotic manipulation. While recent foundation policies benefit from the common-sense reasoning capabilities of internet-scale pretrained vision-language…

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models rely on current observations, including images, language instructions, and robot states, to predict actions and complete tasks. While accurate visual perception is crucial for precise action prediction…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Cheng Yang , Jianhao Jiao , Lingyi Huang , Jinqi Xiao , Zhexiang Tang , Yu Gong , Yibiao Ying , Yang Sui , Jintian Lin , Wen Huang , Bo Yuan

Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs) are becoming increasingly capable across diverse robotic tasks. However, their real-world deployment remains slow and inefficient: demonstration videos are often sped up by 5-10x to appear smooth, with…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Jiaming Tang , Yufei Sun , Yilong Zhao , Shang Yang , Yujun Lin , Zhuoyang Zhang , James Hou , Yao Lu , Zhijian Liu , Song Han

Safety detection models require examples of HHH (Helpful, Harmless, Honest)-violating outputs for robust generalization, however such examples are scarce. Activation Steering (AS) has emerged as a data-efficient method for generating…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Vijeta Deshpande , Tootiya Giyahchi , Veena Padmanabhan , Leman Akoglu , Anna Rumshisky

Activation functions can have a significant impact on reducing the topological complexity of input data and therefore improve the performance of the model. Selecting a suitable activation function is an essential step in neural model…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-02-15 Haishuo Fang , Ji-Ung Lee , Nafise Sadat Moosavi , Iryna Gurevych

This work examines whether activating latent subspaces in language models (LLMs) can steer scientific code generation toward a specific programming language. Five causal LLMs were first evaluated on scientific coding prompts to quantify…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-06-24 Vansh Sharma , Venkat Raman

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-25 Pau Rodriguez , Arno Blaas , Michal Klein , Luca Zappella , Nicholas Apostoloff , Marco Cuturi , Xavier Suau

Masked diffusion language models (MDLMs) generate text via iterative masked-token denoising, enabling mask-parallel decoding and distinct controllability and efficiency tradeoffs from autoregressive LLMs. Yet, efficient representation-level…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Adi Shnaidman , Erin Feiglin , Osher Yaari , Efrat Mentel , Amit Levi , Raz Lapid

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) often exhibit significant modality preference, which is a tendency to favor one modality over another. Depending on the input, they may over-rely on linguistic priors relative to visual evidence, or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-16 Zihan Huang , Xintong Li , Rohan Surana , Tong Yu , Rui Wang , Julian McAuley , Jingbo Shang , Junda Wu

LLMs have shown remarkable capabilities, but precisely controlling their response behavior remains challenging. Existing activation steering methods alter LLM behavior indiscriminately, limiting their practical applicability in settings…

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-23 Jingyuan Yang , Rongjun Li , Weixuan Wang , Ziyu Zhou , Zhiyong Feng , Wei Peng

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Simon Ostermann , Daniil Gurgurov , Tanja Baeumel , Michael A. Hedderich , Sebastian Lapuschkin , Wojciech Samek , Vera Schmitt

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-10 Niklas Herbster , Martin Zborowski , Alberto Tosato , Gauthier Gidel , Tommaso Tosato

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

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