Related papers: Prompt-Activation Duality: Improving Activation St…
Prompt engineering and finetuning aim to maximize language model performance on a given metric (like toxicity reduction). However, these methods do not fully elicit a model's capabilities. To reduce this gap, we introduce activation…
Where should we intervene in a language model (LM) to localize and control behaviors that are diffused across many tokens of a long-form response? We introduce Generative Causal Mediation (GCM), a procedure for selecting model components…
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…
Audio diffusion models can synthesize high-fidelity music from text, yet achieving fine-grained control over specific musical attributes remains challenging, as their internal mechanisms for representing high-level concepts are poorly…
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…
Controlling the behaviors of large language models (LLM) is fundamental to their safety alignment and reliable deployment. However, existing steering methods are primarily driven by empirical insights and lack theoretical performance…
When language model agents tackle complex software engineering tasks, they often degrade over long trajectories, which we define as *agent drift*. We focus on two recurring failure modes *overthinking* and *overacting*, i.e., where the…
Activation steering is a popular white-box control technique that modifies model activations to elicit an abstract change in its behavior. It has also become a standard tool in interpretability (e.g., probing truthfulness, or translating…
Despite their impressive capabilities, current Text-to-Image (T2I) models remain prone to generating unsafe and toxic content. While activation steering offers a promising inference-time intervention, we observe that linear activation…
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…
Activation steering is a promising technique for controlling LLM behavior by adding semantically meaningful vectors directly into a model's hidden states during inference. It is often framed as a precise, interpretable, and potentially…
Large language models frequently produce errors in reasoning tasks despite possessing the underlying knowledge required for correct reasoning. One possible approach to improve reasoning consistency is through activation steering. However,…
The ability to follow instructions is crucial for numerous real-world applications of language models. In pursuit of deeper insights and more powerful capabilities, we derive instruction-specific vector representations from language models…
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…
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have recently emerged as a powerful tool for language model steering. Prior work has explored top-k SAE latents for steering, but we observe that many dimensions among the top-k latents capture non-semantic…
Activation steering is a method for controlling Large Language Model (LLM) behavior by intervening in its internal representations to increase the alignment with a specific target feature direction. However, standard interventions, such as…
Large Language Models employing extended chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning often suffer from the overthinking phenomenon, generating excessive and redundant reasoning steps that increase computational costs while potentially degrading…
Inference-time intervention (ITI) has emerged as a promising method for steering large language model (LLM) behavior in a particular direction (e.g., improving helpfulness) by intervening on token representations without costly updates to…
Recent work in activation steering has demonstrated the potential to better control the outputs of Large Language Models (LLMs), but it involves finding steering vectors. This is difficult because engineers do not typically know how…
Inference-time steering offers a promising way to control language models (LMs) without retraining. However, standard approaches typically rely on activation addition, which inevitably alters the hidden-state magnitudes raising concerns…