We introduce Inference-Time Intervention (ITI), a technique designed to enhance the truthfulness of large language models (LLMs). ITI operates by shifting model activations during inference, following a learned set of directions across a limited number of attention heads. This intervention significantly improves the performance of LLaMA models on the TruthfulQA benchmark. On an instruction-finetuned LLaMA called Alpaca, ITI improves its truthfulness from $32.5\%$ to $65.1\%$. We identify a tradeoff between truthfulness and helpfulness and demonstrate how to balance it by tuning the intervention strength. ITI is minimally invasive and computationally inexpensive. Moreover, the technique is data efficient: while approaches like RLHF require extensive annotations, ITI locates truthful directions using only few hundred examples. Our findings suggest that LLMs may have an internal representation of the likelihood of something being true, even as they produce falsehoods on the surface.

We introduce Inference-Time Intervention (ITI), a technique designed to enhance the "truthfulness" of large language models (LLMs). ITI operates by shifting model activations during inference, following a learned set of directions across a limited number of attention heads. This intervention significantly improves the performance of LLaMA models on the TruthfulQA benchmark. On an instruction-finetuned LLaMA called Alpaca, ITI improves its truthfulness from 32.5\% to 65.1\% . We identify a tradeoff between truthfulness and helpfulness and demonstrate how to balance it by tuning the intervention strength.

In this paper, we explore the foundational mechanisms of memorization and generalization in Large Language Models (LLMs), inspired by the functional specialization observed in the human brain. Our investigation serves as a case study leveraging specially designed datasets and experimental-scale LLMs to lay the groundwork for understanding these behaviors. Specifically, we aim to first enable LLMs to exhibit both memorization and generalization by training with the designed dataset, then (a) examine whether LLMs exhibit neuron-level spatial differentiation for memorization and generalization, (b) predict these behaviors using model internal representations, and (c) steer the behaviors through inference-time interventions. Our findings reveal that neuron-wise differentiation of memorization and generalization is observable in LLMs, and targeted interventions can successfully direct their behavior.