arXiv AI

Decomposing how prompting steers behavior

arXiv:2606. 03093v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Prompting steers large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs) without weight updates, but it remains unclear how instruction changes reshape internal representations to produce behavior.

arXiv AI
Sep 1

VLA-Trace: Diagnosing Vision-Language-Action Models through Representation and Behavior Tracing

arXiv:2605.30117v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Understanding how Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models transform multimodal knowledge into embodied control remains an open challenge. We present VL...

By Haoyuan Shi, Xiancong Ren, Yingji Zhang, Qinfan Zhang, Jiayu Hu, Haozhe Shan, Han Dong, Jinpeng Lu, Yinda Chen, Yi Zhang, Yong Dai, Xiaozhu Ju
arXiv Computation and Language
3d ago

MetaSteer: Context-Conditioned, nonlinear Steering via Attention-Projection Adaptation

MetaSteer is a new method for steering large language models that learns nonlinear, context-dependent interventions applied to attention projection matrices. Unlike traditional linear, context-independent techniques, MetaSteer adapts its effects based on the input, requiring no linear concept-geometry assumption. Trained once on a pooled preference corpus, it transfers zero‑shot to unseen concepts and out‑of‑distribution contexts, matching or surpassing strong task‑specific baselines on multiple benchmarks and model families.

By Mehdi Jafari, Hao Xue, Flora Salim
arXiv AI
Aug 19

Encoded but Not Actionable: Auditing the Decode-Generate-Steer Gap in Frozen LLMs for Geometric Constraints

The paper audits frozen decoder‑only large language models (LLMs) on geometric reasoning tasks using parametric CAD constraints. It probes hidden states for linear decodability, forced‑choice generation, activation‑level influence, and behavioral steerability, finding that pretraining improves decoding of local geometric relations but not sketch‑level DOF status. The study shows that decodable information is not always actionable: generation often fails to express it, and steering interventions do not reliably control outputs, revealing divergences among decodability, generation, activation influence, and steerability.

By Man Liang, Xinzhao Cheng, Faizan Wajid
arXiv Computer Vision
3d ago

Correcting WHERE, Preserving HOW: Compositional Generalization for Vision-Language-Action Models via Referential Guidance

arXiv:2609.38616v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models enable flexible action generation, their generalization across diverse environmental elements, including ma...

By Yanyan Zhang, Disheng Liu, Xinpeng Li, Chaoda Song, Mohsen Hariri, Debargha Ganguly, Wang Yang, Kai Ye, Bryce Grant, Vipin Chaudhary, Yu Yin
arXiv Machine Learning
4d ago

Disentangling Spurious Correlations in Vision-Language-Action Models via Predicting Domain-Invariant Latent Lookahead

arXiv:2609.37165v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models remain brittle under visual distribution shifts, often relying on spurious correlations tied to domain-specific f...

By Junghyun Kim, Ngseo Kim, ChungWoo Lee, Seoyeon Lee, Woo-Jeong Baek, Adam Zhou, Chip Huyen, Jun-Ki Lee, Gi-Cheon Kang, Byoung-Tak Zhang