arXiv Machine Learning

A Coin Flip Per Token: Bernoulli Sparse Steering of Large Language Models

arXiv:2607. 05615v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Activation steering via sparse autoencoders (SAEs) enables behavioral control of large language models without task-specific fine-tuning, but standard methods apply the steering signal at every generated token, incurring constant per-token perturbation that risks degrading fluency.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 15

Towards Steering without Sacrifice: Principled Training of Steering Vectors for Prompt-only Interventions

arXiv:2605. 05983v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recently, steering vectors (SVs) have emerged as an effective and lightweight approach to steer behaviors of large language models (LLMs), among which fine-tuned SVs are more effective than optimization-free ones.

By Yuntai Bao, Qinfeng Li, Xinyan Yu, Ge Su, Wenqi Zhang, Liu Yan, Haiqin Weng, Jianwei Yin, Xuhong Zhang
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 11

When is Your LLM Steerable?

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
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 9

Towards Understanding Steering Strength

arXiv:2602. 02712v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A popular approach to post-training control of large language models (LLMs) is the steering of intermediate latent representations.

By Magamed Taimeskhanov, Samuel Vaiter, Damien Garreau
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 8

Uncertainty-Aware LLM-Guided Policy Shaping for Sparse-Reward Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606. 06673v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sparse rewards and heterogeneous task sequences remain persistent challenges in Reinforcement Learning (RL), often resulting in slow convergence, weak generalization, and inefficient exploration.

By Ujjwal Bhatta, Utsabi Dangol, Sumaly Bajracharya, Rodrigue Rizk, KC Santosh
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 10

When is Your LLM Steerable?

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 AI
Jul 23

Statistically Grounded Sparse-Feature Interventions for Activation-Space Control in Large Language Models

arXiv:2607. 19364v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Activation steering offers a lightweight alternative to fine-tuning for behavioral control of large language models, but SAE-based steering methods often rely on learned steering objectives or single-criterion feature selection.

By Oshayer Siddique, J. M Areeb Uzair Alam, Md Jobayer Rahman Rafy, Syed Rifat Raiyan, Hasan Mahmud, Md Kamrul Hasan