arXiv:2607. 25907v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Activation steering controls model behavior by editing internal activations at inference time.
By Deepanshu Mody, Samarth Agarwal, Utkarsh Mittal, Dipesh Mahato
arXiv:2606. 08682v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Activation steering has emerged as a popular inference-time technique for modulating the behavior of large language models (LLMs).
By Qi Cao, Jian Lou, Meiting Liu, Wenjie Feng, Dan Li, See-Kiong Ng, Anh Tuan Luu
arXiv:2606. 12747v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Safety-relevant studies of language models, including alignment and jailbreaking evaluations and AI control protocols, often rely on prefilling model outputs.
By Andy Wang, Parv Mahajan, David Demitri Africa, Alexandra Souly, Jordan Taylor, Robert Kirk
arXiv:2606. 08365v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sparse autoencoder (SAE) features are increasingly used to steer language models, but feature steering is rarely clean: the same intervention can behave inconsistently across contexts and perturb unrelated features.
By Evan Duan
arXiv:2608. 12334v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Despite the impressive multilingual capabilities of Large Language Models, the latent dynamics dictating language selection remain poorly understood.
By Arnav Srivastav
arXiv:2603. 03824v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Humans often become more self-aware under threat, yet can lose self-awareness when absorbed in a task; we hypothesize that language models exhibit environment-dependent \textit{evaluation awareness}.
By Maheep Chaudhary
arXiv:2606. 07963v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Backdoor attacks in large language models (LLMs) are often treated as isolated trigger-response failures, motivating defenses tailored to specific triggers or behaviors.
By Omar Mahmoud, Aly M. Kassem, Thommen George Karimpanal, Buddhika Laknath Semage, Negar Rostamzadeh, Golnoosh Farnadi, Santu Rana
arXiv:2507. 18043v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Inference-time steering methods offer a lightweight alternative to fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs) by modifying internal activations at test time without updating model weights.
By Duy Nguyen, Archiki Prasad, Elias Stengel-Eskin, Mohit Bansal
arXiv:2603. 21396v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: 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.
By Uzay Macar, Li Yang, Atticus Wang, Peter Wallich, Emmanuel Ameisen, Jack Lindsey
arXiv:2606. 22686v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Modern Large Language Models (LLMs) rely on extensive safety alignment, yet the mechanistic basis of refusal remains opaque.
By Shivam Ratnakar, Kartikeya Vats
arXiv:2608. 05164v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Independently trained large language models may develop shared internal representations of semantic concepts despite architectural differences -- but whether this geometric similarity has functional consequences for cross-model behavioural control remains untested.
By Ayushi Agarwal
arXiv:2608. 11227v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Activation steering modifies a language model by adding a learned direction to its hidden activations, enabling targeted behavioral changes without retraining.
By Chong Yong Ong, Alson Wei Jie Sim, Peixin Zhang, Jun Sun