Steering Language Models Before They Speak: Logit-Level Interventions
Controllable generation requires language models to realize output characteristics such as reading level, politeness, and toxicity. Existing steering methods are often indirect, require access to internal activations, or depend on auxiliary trained models. We propose SWAI, a training-free inference-time method that addresses these limitations by steering directly in logit space using corpus-derived token statistics. SWAI computes z-normalized one-vs-rest log-odds scores from labeled corpora and biases high-scoring tokens only within the model's top-K candidate set, allowing control to favor target-characteristic tokens while preserving contextually plausible choices. Across readability, politeness, and toxicity control, SWAI consistently improves over prompt-based and prior logit-level baselines without modifying model parameters, accessing internal layers, or training an auxiliary model. Selectivity and lookup-table ablations show that the gains come from target-specific statistical scores rather than generic logit perturbation. These results indicate that effective steering does not require learned controllers when the logit intervention is guided by target-specific statistics under high-probability candidates.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Overcoming State Inertia in Full-Duplex Spoken Language Models via Activation Steering
Full-duplex spoken language models (FD-SLMs) enable seamless speech interaction by allowing models to listen and speak simultaneously, yet the internal mechanism by which they coordinate listening and speaking remains un…
Do Multilingual LLMs Think In English?
Large language models (LLMs) have multilingual capabilities and can solve tasks across various languages. However, we show that current LLMs make key decisions in a representation space closest to English, regardless of …
CBMAS: Cognitive Behavioral Modeling via Activation Steering
Large language models (LLMs) often encode cognitive behaviors unpredictably across prompts, layers, and contexts, making them difficult to diagnose and control. We present CBMAS, a diagnostic framework for continuous act…
Predicting Where Steering Vectors Succeed
Steering vectors work for some concepts and layers but fail for others, and practitioners have no way to predict which setting applies before running an intervention. We introduce the Linear Accessibility Profile (LAP), …
OGLS-SD: On-Policy Self-Distillation with Outcome-Guided Logit Steering for LLM Reasoning
We study on-policy self-distillation (OPSD), where a language model improves its reasoning ability by distilling privileged teacher distributions along its own on-policy trajectories. Despite its promise, OPSD can suffer…
Mathematical Reasoning