arXiv:2606. 11599v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Activation steering offers a lightweight approach to control language models' behavior at inference time, but whether it succeeds or fails heavily depends on the prompt, concept, model, and steering configuration.
By Chenrui Fan, Yize Cheng, Ming Li, Soheil Feizi, Tianyi Zhou
Activation steering offers a lightweight approach to control language models' behavior at inference time, but whether it succeeds or fails heavily depends on the prompt, concept, model, and steering configuration. Finding the regime and boundaries of successful steering typically requires expensive grid searches and post-hoc evaluation of full autoregressive rollouts.
arXiv:2606. 11400v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) excel at audio understanding but expose little about where in an audio signal they attend.
By Tsung-En Lin, Hung-Yi Lee
The paper investigates how steering vectors influence large language models (LLMs) by conducting a mechanistic case study on refusal behavior. Using a multi-token activation patching framework, the authors find that steering methods primarily target the OV circuit of the attention mechanism, largely ignoring the QK circuit, and that these circuits are functionally interchangeable across different steering approaches. The study also shows that steering vectors can be sparsified by 85–96% with minimal performance loss and that key dimensions are consistently identified across methods.
By Stephen Cheng, Sarah Wiegreffe, Dinesh Manocha
arXiv:2607. 29062v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Model capabilities have improved in large part due to scaling chain of thought.
By Matthew Nguyen, Kyle Cox, Austin Meek, Iv\'an Arcuschin
arXiv:2608. 02957v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Steering vectors (SVs) are widely used to influence the expression of concepts (e.
By Max Torop, Aria Masoomi, Jennifer Dy
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: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:2603. 01437v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As chain of thought (CoT) has become central to scaling reasoning capabilities in large language models (LLMs), it has also emerged as a promising tool for interpretability, suggesting the opportunity to understand model decisions through verbalized reasoning.
By Kyle Cox, Darius Kianersi, Adri\`a Garriga-Alonso
arXiv:2608.21664v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Safe deployment of increasingly capable models will likely come to rely on latent-space monitoring as a complement to behavioral evaluations, especiall...
By Marek Mateusz Kowalski, Joshua Fonseca Rivera, Uzay Macar, David Demitri Africa
arXiv:2609.37568v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Audio-visual large language models (AVLLMs) have made remarkable progress in multimodal understanding and reasoning through interactions among visual,...
By Yu Zhang, Pingrui Zhang, Xuefeng Bai, Pengfei Zhang, Yang Xiang, Kehai Chen
arXiv:2606. 11172v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deployed large reasoning models (LRMs) often behave unexpectedly.
By Evgenii Kortukov, Piotr Komorowski, Florian Klein, Paula Engl, Gabriele Sarti, Seong Joon Oh, Sebastian Lapuschkin, Wojciech Samek