Representation Engineering

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Transfer Safety Awareness for Cross-Modal Safety Drift in Multimodal Large Language Models
Sep 2, 2026Tianqi Xiao, Shiyao Cui, Minghao Zhang +2Multimodal Large Language Models Representation Engineering
1The Conversational AI (CoAI) group, DCST, Tsinghua University · 3Northwestern Polytechnical University · School of Cyberspace Security, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications +1
Architectural Backdoors in Vision-Language Model Supply Chains via Representation Steering
Jul 28, 2026Maria Rosaria Briglia, Igor Maljkovic, Antonio Emanuele Cinà +3Adversarial Attacks on VLMs Representation Engineering
Sapienza University of Rome, Italy · University of Genoa, Italy · University of Trieste, Italy +1
LoRA for Gender-Inclusive Rewriting and Activation Steering for Counter-Narrative Generation
Jul 25, 2026Akhil Rajeev P, Manoj Balaji JGender Bias in Language Models Language Model Steering
C-DAC, Bangalore · Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur
Pulling The REINS: Training-Free Safety Alignment of Video Diffusion Models via Representation Steering
Jun 15, 2026Rohit Kundu, Arindam Dutta, Sarosij Bose +2Diffusion Model Alignment Video Diffusion Models
University of California, Riverside · YouTube (Google)
The Signs Were Always There: Training-Free Concept Detection and Steering in Raw Transformer Dimensions
Jun 10, 2026Varun Reddy NalagatlaTransformer Interpretability Representation Engineering
Amazon Web Services
Whisper Hallucination Detection and Mitigation via Hidden Representation Steering and Sparse AutoEncoders
Jun 5, 2026Georgii Aparin, Vadim Popov, Tasnima Sadekova +1Audio-Language Model Hallucination Detection Sparse Autoencoders
AI Foundation and Algorithm Lab · National Research University Higher School of Economics
Towards the Readability of LLM-Generated Codes through Multitask Representation Engineering
Jun 4, 2026Huifan Gao, Liuhua He, Yinghui Pan +4Language Model Steering Representation Engineering
School of Aerospace Engineering, Xiamen University, Xiamen, China · School of Artificial Intelligence, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, China · College of Computer and Cyber Security, Fujian Normal University, Fuzhou, China +3
HARVE: Hacking-Aware Reward-Head Vector Editing for Robust Reward Models
Jun 2, 2026Shuang Liu, Yuxuan Bo, Qiuyang Zhao +4Reward Modeling Reward Hacking
Carnegie Mellon University · University of Virginia · Harvard University +4
REED: Post-Training Representation Editing for Cross-Domain Linguistic Steganalysis
May 27, 2026Ruohan Lei, Jianxin Gao, Wanli Peng +1Cross-Domain Generalization Representation Engineering
China Agricultural University, Beijing, China · Jiangsu Normal University, Xuzhou, China
SwordBench: Evaluating Orthogonality of Steering Image Representations
May 10, 2026Vladimir Zaigrajew, Dawid Pludowski, Hubert Baniecki +1Vision Foundation Models Representation Engineering
Centre for Credible AI Warsaw University of Technology Warsaw, Poland · University of Warsaw Warsaw, Poland
Knowledge Vector of Logical Reasoning in Large Language Models
Apr 26, 2026Zixuan Wang, Yuanyuan LeiLLM Interpretability Representation Engineering
Department of Computer & Information Science and Engineering University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, United States
Pref-CTRL: Preference Driven LLM Alignment using Representation Editing
Apr 26, 2026Imranul Ashrafi, Inigo Jauregi Unanue, Massimo PiccardiLLM Alignment Representation Engineering
University of Technology Sydney, Australia
Beyond Forgetting: Representation Misdirection Elicits Controllable Side Behaviors and Capabilities
Jan 29, 2026Tien Dang, The-Hai Nguyen, Dinh Mai Phuong +5Linear Representation Hypothesis Controllable Text Generation
Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology · Monash University · Quantum AI and Cyber Security Institute, FPT Corporation +1

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Transfer Safety Awareness for Cross-Modal Safety Drift in Multimodal Large Language Models

Tianqi Xiao, Shiyao Cui, Minghao Zhang, Junxiao Yang+1

1The Conversational AI (CoAI) group, DCST, Tsinghua University · 3Northwestern Polytechnical University · School of Cyberspace Security, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications+1

Multimodal Large Language Models Representation Engineering

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Visual modality enhances the capabilities of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) but also introduces a safety concern: a benign textual query may convey harmful intent when grounded in a visual image. We term this cross-modal safety drift and our pilot studies show that the safety response rate for such requests is substantially lower than that for requests containing explicitly unsafe text. This paper aims to systematically study this issue. First, we conduct an empirical analysis to identify representative unsafe response patterns. Building on these, we interpret model representations and attentions, revealing that visually risky cues receive limited attention and weakly trigger refusal. Motivated by the observation that safety signals from unsafe text processing can be transferred, we propose safety-awareness representation transfer (SRT), a lightweight direction-refinement method that mitigates cross-modal safety drift with a frozen MLLM backbone. Experiments across multiple benchmarks and models show that SRT effectively improves safety in diverse cross-modal settings while preserving utility. Code is available at https://github.com/cucu220123/safety-awareness.

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