Controlling Language and Diffusion Models by Transporting Activations
The increasing capabilities of large generative models and their ever more widespread deployment have raised concerns about their reliability, safety, and potential misuse. To address these issues, recent works have proposed to control model generation by steering model activations in order to effectively induce or prevent the emergence of concepts or behaviours in the generated output. In this paper we introduce Activation Transport (AcT), a general framework to steer activations guided by optimal transport theory that generalizes many previous activation-steering works. AcT is…
This post is divided into three parts; they are: • Why Linear Layers and Activations are Needed in Transformers • Typical Design of the Feed-Forward Network • Variations of the Activation Functions The attention layer is the core function of a transformer model.
We give the first result for agnostically learning Single-Index Models (SIMs) with arbitrary monotone and Lipschitz activations. All prior work either held only in the realizable setting or required the activation to be known. Moreover, we only require the marginal to have bounded second moments, whereas all prior work required…
This paper was accepted at the Workshop on Unifying Representations in Neural Models (UniReps) at NeurIPS 2025. Activation steering methods in large language models (LLMs) have emerged as an effective way to perform targeted updates to enhance generated language without requiring large amounts of adaptation data. We ask whether the…