Activation steering provides a lightweight mechanism for controlling large language models at inference time, but steering vectors can have unintended externalities: utility vectors may weaken safety behavior, while refusal vectors may induce over-refusal on benign prompts. We introduce OPIUM (Optimizing Protected Injections via Utility Manifolds), a training-free method for sanitizing steering vectors through representation matching. Given reference behaviors on two prompt sets, OPIUM optimizes a new steering vector that preserves the downstream representations induced by the desired intervention while matching a safer reference behavior on prompts where the original vector fails. Across steering-externality and over-refusal settings, OPIUM improves the safety--utility tradeoff relative to vanilla steering and directional ablation, suggesting that harmful side effects of activation steering can often be mitigated directly in activation space.
Symbolic Regression (SR) aims to discover analytical equations from observational data and plays a central role in scientific modeling. While recent Large Language Model (LLM) based approaches show promise, they face two limitations. First, they lack data analysis mechanisms for…
A data-driven inverse optimization problem (DDIOP) is the problem of estimating the objective-function parameters (weights) that explain observed optimal-solution data, and it arises in many applications, including integer linear programming (ILP). It is known that, by applying g…
Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a powerful technique to enhance the reasoning capacity of LLMs for optimized code generation. However, existing RLVR approaches primarily rely on outcome-based signals such as correctness and speedup, overlookin…
Balancing sequence length, representational capacity, and long-horizon stability is a central problem in autoregressive (AR) speech and audio generation. Representations with higher frame rates or greater capacity can preserve more signal detail, but they also make streaming gene…
Neural operators provide fast surrogates for time-dependent partial differential equations (PDEs) by applying a learned evolution operator recursively to its own predictions, but this autoregressive rollout feeds every prediction error back as input, so local errors accumulate. E…
Large-scale multivariate time series from heterogeneous IoT sensors demand accurate long-term forecasting for resource scheduling and predictive maintenance. While recent time series foundation models exhibit strong generalization, they rely on static parametric knowledge and lac…