用输入令牌实现多行为联合控制,零样本组合新指令。
Compositional Steering of Large Language Models with Steering Tokens
- 用自蒸馏将自然语言指令转为专用控制令牌
- 可零样本泛化到未见行为组合及数量
- 适合需要多约束输出的部署场景
在真实应用中部署大语言模型需同时满足多种期望行为的可控输出。现有研究多聚焦单一行为控制,而多行为联合控制(即组合式控制)仍属未充分探索领域。本文提出组合式控制令牌,通过自蒸馏将自然语言指令嵌入专属令牌。与多数基于激活空间的方法不同,本方法在输入令牌空间中实现控制,支持更有效的零样本组合。我们训练专用组合令牌,使其能有效捕捉组合概念:在未见过的行为组合、甚至未见过的行为数量上均表现良好。跨多种大模型架构的实验表明,该方法在控制输出长度、格式、结构、语言等可验证约束方面优于指令、激活空间控制和LoRA融合等方法。此外,控制令牌与自然语言指令可互补,联合使用效果更优。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Deploying LLMs in real-world applications requires controllable output that satisfies multiple desiderata at the same time. While existing work extensively addresses LLM steering for a single behavior, \textit{compositional steering} -- i.e., steering LLMs simultaneously towards multiple behaviors -- remains an underexplored problem. In this work, we propose \emph{compositional steering tokens} for multi-behavior steering. We first embed individual behaviors, expressed as natural language instructions, into dedicated tokens via self-distillation. Contrary to most prior work, which operates in the activation space, our behavior steers live in the space of input tokens, enabling more effective zero-shot composition. We then train a dedicated \textit{composition token} on pairs of behaviors and show that it successfully captures the notion of composition: it generalizes well to \textit{unseen} compositions, including those with unseen behaviors as well as those with an unseen \textit{number} of behaviors. Our experiments across different LLM architectures show that steering tokens lead to superior multi-behavior steering of verifiable constraints (e.g., length, format, structure, language) compared to competing approaches (instructions, activation steering, and LoRA merging). Moreover, we show that steering tokens complement natural language instructions, with their combination resulting in further gains.
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