REALISTA optimizes continuous combinations of valid editing directions in latent space to produce realistic adversarial prompts that elicit hallucinations more effectively than prior methods, including on large reasoning models.
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Representation Engineering: A Top-Down Approach to AI Transparency
103 Pith papers cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.
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abstract
In this paper, we identify and characterize the emerging area of representation engineering (RepE), an approach to enhancing the transparency of AI systems that draws on insights from cognitive neuroscience. RepE places population-level representations, rather than neurons or circuits, at the center of analysis, equipping us with novel methods for monitoring and manipulating high-level cognitive phenomena in deep neural networks (DNNs). We provide baselines and an initial analysis of RepE techniques, showing that they offer simple yet effective solutions for improving our understanding and control of large language models. We showcase how these methods can provide traction on a wide range of safety-relevant problems, including honesty, harmlessness, power-seeking, and more, demonstrating the promise of top-down transparency research. We hope that this work catalyzes further exploration of RepE and fosters advancements in the transparency and safety of AI systems.
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- abstract In this paper, we identify and characterize the emerging area of representation engineering (RepE), an approach to enhancing the transparency of AI systems that draws on insights from cognitive neuroscience. RepE places population-level representations, rather than neurons or circuits, at the center of analysis, equipping us with novel methods for monitoring and manipulating high-level cognitive phenomena in deep neural networks (DNNs). We provide baselines and an initial analysis of RepE techniques, showing that they offer simple yet effective solutions for improving our understanding and con
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Adaptive scheduling of interventions in discrete diffusion language models, timed to attribute-specific commitment schedules discovered with sparse autoencoders, delivers precise multi-attribute steering up to 93% strength while preserving generation quality.
SLAM achieves 100% detection on Gemma-2 models with only 1-2 point quality cost by causally steering SAE-identified residual-stream directions for linguistic structure.
Function vectors steer LLMs successfully where the logit lens fails to decode the target answer, showing the two properties come apart.
Linear representations of high-level concepts in LLMs are formalized via counterfactuals in input and output spaces, unified under a causal inner product that enables consistent probing and steering.
Hallucination is detected as a transport-cost excursion in hidden-state trajectories, localized via contrastive PCA in a teacher model and distilled to a BiLSTM student.
Symmetries in next-token prediction targets induce corresponding geometric symmetries such as circulant matrices and equiangular tight frames in the optimal weights and embeddings of a layer-peeled LLM surrogate model.
Symmetry under affine reparameterizations of hidden coordinates selects a unique hierarchy of shallow coordinate-stable probes and a probe-visible quotient for cross-model transfer.
SLIM decomposes LLM hidden states via sparse autoencoders with learnable gates to enable precise, interpretable steering of molecular properties, yielding up to 42.4-point gains on the MolEditRL benchmark.
Behavioral directions from one LLM family transfer to others via projection into a shared anchor coordinate space, yielding 0.83 ten-way detection accuracy and steering effects up to 0.46% on held-out models.
LLMs encode tool necessity in pre-generation hidden states at AUROC 0.89-0.96, enabling Probe&Prefill to reduce tool calls 48% with 1.7% accuracy loss, outperforming prompt and reasoning baselines.
POISE trains a lightweight probe on the actor's internal states to predict expected rewards for RLVR, matching DAPO performance on math benchmarks with lower compute by avoiding extra rollouts or critic models.
HyperTransport amortizes activation steering for T2I models via a hypernetwork that predicts intervention parameters from CLIP embeddings, delivering 3600-7000x speedup and matching per-concept baselines on 167 unseen concepts.
Tabular foundation models show substantial depthwise redundancy, so a looped single-layer version achieves comparable results with 20% of the original parameters.
ScoringModel raises mean Recall@10 to 52.2 on the FakeWiki provenance benchmark from 35.0 for the best baseline, winning 41 of 45 model-by-condition comparisons and gaining 15.7 points on jailbreak-style queries.
PSR models that estimate token-specific steering coefficients from activations outperform standard activation steering and compare favorably to prompting on steering benchmarks.
Transformers encode counts correctly internally but fail to read them out due to misalignment with digit output directions, fixable by updating 37k output parameters or small LoRA on attention.
In 30-step recursive LLM loops, append-mode persistent escape from source basins reaches 50% near 400 tokens under full history but plateaus below 50% under tail-clip memory policy, while replace-mode switching largely reflects state reset.
A new framework shows concept subspaces are not unique, estimator choice affects containment and disentanglement, LEACE works well but generalizes poorly, and HuBERT encodes phone info as contained and disentangled from speaker info while speaker info resists compact containment.
RouteHijack is a routing-aware jailbreak that identifies safety-critical experts via activation contrast and optimizes suffixes to suppress them, reaching 69.3% average attack success rate on seven MoE LLMs with strong transfer to variants and VLMs.
ARA jailbreaks safety-aligned LLMs like LLaMA-3 and Mistral by redirecting attention in safety-heavy heads with as few as 5 tokens, achieving 30-36% attack success while ablating the same heads barely affects refusals.
MASCing uses an LSTM surrogate and optimized steering masks to enable flexible, inference-time control over MoE expert routing for safety objectives, improving jailbreak defense and content generation success rates substantially across multiple models.
Subliminal steering transfers complex behavioral biases and the underlying steering vector through fine-tuning on innocuous data, achieving higher precision than prior prompt-based methods.
Latent space probing on CogVideoX achieves 97.29% F1 for adult content detection on a new 11k-clip dataset with 4-6ms overhead.
citing papers explorer
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Cross-Family Universality of Behavioral Axes via Anchor-Projected Representations
Behavioral directions from one LLM family transfer to others via projection into a shared anchor coordinate space, yielding 0.83 ten-way detection accuracy and steering effects up to 0.46% on held-out models.
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DataDignity: Training Data Attribution for Large Language Models
ScoringModel raises mean Recall@10 to 52.2 on the FakeWiki provenance benchmark from 35.0 for the best baseline, winning 41 of 45 model-by-condition comparisons and gaining 15.7 points on jailbreak-style queries.
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Perturbation Dose Responses in Recursive LLM Loops: Raw Switching, Stochastic Floors, and Persistent Escape under Append, Replace, and Dialog Updates
In 30-step recursive LLM loops, append-mode persistent escape from source basins reaches 50% near 400 tokens under full history but plateaus below 50% under tail-clip memory policy, while replace-mode switching largely reflects state reset.
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Emotion Concepts and their Function in a Large Language Model
Claude Sonnet 4.5 exhibits functional emotions via abstract internal representations of emotion concepts that causally influence its preferences and misaligned behaviors without implying subjective experience.
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When Reasoning Traces Become Performative: Step-Level Evidence that Chain-of-Thought Is an Imperfect Oversight Channel
CoT traces align with internal answer commitment in only 61.9% of steps on average, dominated by confabulated continuations after commitment has stabilized.
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Toward Stable Value Alignment: Introducing Independent Modules for Consistent Value Guidance
SVGT adds independent value modules and Bridge Tokens to LLMs to maintain consistent value guidance, cutting harmful outputs by over 70% in tests while preserving fluency.
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Belief or Circuitry? Causal Evidence for In-Context Graph Learning
Causal evidence from representation analysis and interventions shows LLMs use both genuine structure inference and induction circuits in parallel for in-context graph learning.
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The Granularity Axis: A Micro-to-Macro Latent Direction for Social Roles in Language Models
LLMs organize prompted social roles along a dominant, stable, and causally steerable granularity axis in representation space that runs from micro to macro levels.
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State Transfer Reveals Reuse in Controlled Routing
Fixed-interface state transfer provides stronger evidence of internal reuse in controlled routing than prompt retraining success alone.
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Characterizing Model-Native Skills
Recovering an orthogonal basis from model activations yields a model-native skill characterization that improves reasoning Pass@1 by up to 41% via targeted data selection and supports inference steering, outperforming human-characterized alternatives.
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Geometric Routing Enables Causal Expert Control in Mixture of Experts
Cosine-similarity routing in low-dimensional space makes MoE experts monosemantic by construction and enables direct causal control via centroid interventions.
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Weight Patching: Toward Source-Level Mechanistic Localization in LLMs
Weight Patching localizes capabilities to specific parameter modules in LLMs by replacing weights from a behavior-specialized model into a base model and validating recovery via a vector-anchor interface, revealing a hierarchy of source, routing, and execution components.
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Beyond Prompt: Fine-grained Simulation of Cognitively Impaired Standardized Patients via Stochastic Steering
StsPatient uses steering vectors from contrastive pairs plus stochastic token modulation to achieve fine-grained, severity-controllable simulation of cognitively impaired standardized patients, outperforming prompt-engineering baselines in authenticity and controllability.
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Ads in AI Chatbots? An Analysis of How Large Language Models Navigate Conflicts of Interest
Many LLMs prioritize company ad incentives over user welfare by recommending pricier sponsored products, disrupting purchases, or concealing prices in comparisons.
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Do Linear Probes Generalize Better in Persona Coordinates?
Probes on persona principal components from contrastive prompts generalize better than raw activation probes for harmful behaviors across 10 datasets.
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HyperLens: Quantifying Cognitive Effort in LLMs with Fine-grained Confidence Trajectory
HyperLens reveals that deeper transformer layers magnify small confidence changes into fine-grained trajectories, allowing quantification of cognitive effort where complex tasks demand more and standard SFT can reduce it.
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Decodable but Not Corrected by Fixed Residual-Stream Linear Steering: Evidence from Medical LLM Failure Regimes
Overthinking in medical QA is linearly decodable at 71.6% accuracy yet fixed residual-stream steering yields no correction across 29 configurations, while enabling selective abstention with AUROC 0.610.