5 papers
Where Steering Signals Come From: Activation Source Selection in Activation Steering
Jiaran Ye, Lingxu Ran, Zijun Yao +5
Activation steering controls language models by adding vectors or features to hidden states at inference time, but the upstream source of these steering signals is often treated as…
ASA: Backbone-Training-Free Representation Engineering for Tool-Calling Agents
Youjin Wang, Run Zhou, Yingjie Ma +6
Adapting LLM agents to domain-specific tool calling remains notably brittle under evolving interfaces. Prompt and schema engineering is easy to deploy but often fragile under distr…
Do Latent-CoT Models Think Step-by-Step? A Mechanistic Study on Sequential Reasoning Tasks
Jia Liang, Liangming Pan
Latent Chain-of-Thought (Latent-CoT) aims to enable step-by-step computation without emitting long rationales, yet its mechanisms remain unclear. We study CODI, a continuous-though…
How do Transformers Learn Implicit Reasoning?
Jiaran Ye, Zijun Yao, Zhidian Huang +8
Recent work suggests that large language models (LLMs) can perform multi-hop reasoning implicitly -- producing correct answers without explicitly verbalizing intermediate steps --…
ConciseRL: Conciseness-Guided Reinforcement Learning for Efficient Reasoning Models
Razvan-Gabriel Dumitru, Darius Peteleaza, Vikas Yadav +1
Large language models excel at complex tasks by breaking down problems into structured reasoning steps. However, reasoning traces often extend beyond reaching a correct answer, cau…