Probes on activation vectors are widely used to detect misbehavior in language models, but their success relies on the assumption that models cannot control what their activations encode. Humans can l...
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: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:2602. 06941v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models can recover mid-generation from task-misaligned activation steering, producing explicit verbal restarts (e.
By Alex McKenzie, Keenan Pepper, Stijn Servaes, Martin Leitgab, Murat Cubuktepe, Mike Vaiana, Diogo de Lucena, Judd Rosenblatt, Michael S. A. Graziano
arXiv:2605.30381v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: When a language model is fine-tuned to produce systematically incorrect responses, does this training leave a structured, linearly recoverabl...
By Vahideh Zolfaghari
arXiv:2607. 03598v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When a person shares something with a language model, the model often answers the surface of the message rather than what the sender was doing by sending it: share a finished project and it critiques the code; share a raw late-night line and it runs a wellness check.
By Alex Kwon
The study investigates how task context reshapes the roles of shared attention heads in large language models. By applying identical graph facts and measuring interventions on attention heads and downstream activations, the authors show that task changes redistribute influence across five open‑weight models, causing the same heads to respond to different facts and affect later components differently. Linear response maps before and after activation edits reveal significant reductions in prediction error, indicating that task context alters both the facts processed and the downstream impact of shared components.
By Sovesh Mohapatra, Dani S Bassett
The paper investigates whether large language models (LLMs) can control their own internal representations, a question relevant to machine metacognition and AI safety. Previous work claimed such control using neurofeedback, but the targets were not privileged, allowing third‑party inference from prompts. By redesigning the paradigm to enforce privileged access—mirroring human neurofeedback experiments—the authors find that LLMs fail to reliably control these internal representations, indicating that earlier claims may have relied on superficial mechanisms.
By Koshiro Aoki, Ryota Takatsuki, Gouki Minegishi, Yusuke Haruki, Daisuke Kawahara
Whether large language models (LLMs) can control their own internal representations matters for both machine metacognition and AI safety. A recent study applied neurofeedback to LLMs and claimed that...
arXiv:2607. 20379v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Natural-language autoencoders score explanations of hidden activations by reconstruction: an explanation is deemed faithful if the activation can be regenerated from it.
By Hiskias Dingeto
arXiv:2609.25602v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: In language models, the choice between believing the prompt and believing the weights is made by a handful of identifiable attention heads. Instruction...
By Shubham Santosh Pandere, Gautam Ranka, Ritika Varshney, Navya Deshmukh, Roushni Sareen, Roshan Kumar Singh
The paper introduces Declarative Attention (DA), a protocol that lets language models explicitly declare which parts of their context to focus on during generation. By partitioning decoding into full-context, region-specific, and recent-output-only modes, the inference engine can skip large portions of the KV cache, dramatically reducing attended tokens. Experiments on 15 long-context tasks with off-the-shelf models show significant savings (52.0% and 31.1% reductions) with only modest accuracy drops that diminish as model size increases.
By Namgyu Ho, Huzama Ahmad, Woosung Koh, Se-Young Yun, Tal Schuster, Cicero Nogueira dos Santos