CORTEXA
← Browse
arxivcs.CLcs.AIcs.LG2026-06-30

Harnessing the Latent Space: From Steering Vectors to Model Calibrators for Control and Trust

Nishant Subramani

Language models have changed from unreliable text generators to highly-capable large models with trillions of parameters. Capability increases come hand-in-hand with increases in scale, making understanding the internal representations of models more challenging. Since millions of users increasing rely on language models to interact with external tools or make decisions in medium or high-stakes scenarios, we need to establish control over model behavior and know when to trust model outputs. In this paper, we discuss our contributions on harnessing the latent spaces by proposing steering vectors for control and developing latent space-based model calibrators for trust. Together, our contributions help demystify the latent spaces of language models and offer new insights into how to harness model internals to build more trustworthy language technology.

View free PDFSource page

Related papers

arxivcs.DBcs.AIcs.CLcs.LG2026-07-24

DBA-Bench: A Production-Fidelity Benchmark for LLM-Based Database Operations Agents

Junming Chen, Junyang Jiang, Xu Chen, Zibo Liang, Kai Zheng

LLM-based database agents show promise, but differing task scopes, testbeds, and metrics hinder comparison. We identify four gaps between evaluation and production operations: live-environment fidelity (multi-turn read-write interaction with a running database); observation-space…

View free PDFSource page
arxivcs.LGcs.AIcs.CL2026-07-24

Cross-Tokenizer On-Policy Distillation via Byte-Prefix Marginalization

Hao Wang, Kun Yuan, Wenlin Zhong, Minglei Zhang, Han Xiao, Ming Sun, et al.

Open-weight language models from different families exhibit complementary capabilities, motivating their consolidation into a compact student through on-policy distillation (OPD). However, full-vocabulary OPD typically assumes a shared tokenizer, while existing cross-tokenizer me…

View free PDFSource page
arxivcs.LGcs.AIcs.CL2026-07-24

Teaching LLMs to Self-Evolve: Cultivating Core Meta-Skills with Reinforcement Learning

Shujin Wu, Cheng Qian, Xiusi Chen, Heng Ji

Test-time scaling through iterative self-evolution with environment feedback, as demonstrated by AlphaEvolve, shows remarkable performance gains. We hypothesize that the success of such evolution frameworks hinges on meta-skills, such as self-reflection with environment feedback,…

View free PDFSource page
arxivcs.CLcs.AIcs.LG2026-07-31

CalibratedRubric: Task-Adaptive Rubric Banks for Open-Ended LLM Evaluation

Mengting Chen, Yanshu Sun, Wanting Liang, Beidi Luan, Rui Sun, Dezhi Chen, et al.

Reliable evaluation of open-ended LLM outputs requires fine-grained rubrics, yet expert curation is costly and difficult to scale. Existing automated pipelines rely on strict judge unanimity and binary variance filters, which cannot distinguish measurable rubrics from informative…

View free PDFSource page
arxivcs.AIcs.CLcs.ETcs.LGcs.MA2026-07-23

The Boundaries of Automation: A Theory of Persistent Human Participation

Fares Fourati, Hinrich Schütze, Eyke Hüllermeier, Iryna Gurevych

The rapid progress of AI has intensified the long-standing pursuit of automation: replacing human participation with algorithms wherever possible. Implicit in this pursuit is the assumption that humans remain in the loop only because current AI systems are not yet sufficiently ca…

View free PDFSource page