As large language models continue to develop and expand, the extensive public data they rely on faces the risk of depletion. Consequently, leveraging private data within organizations to enhance the performance of large models has emerged as a key challenge. The federated learning paradigm, combined with model fine-tuning techniques, effectively reduces the number of trainable parameters. However,the necessity to process high-dimensional feature spaces results in substantial overall computational overhead. To address this issue, we propose the Implicit Federated In-Context Learning (IFed-ICL) framework. IFed-ICL draws inspiration from federated learning to establish a novel distributed collaborative paradigm, by converting client local context examples into implicit vector representations, it enables distributed collaborative computation during the inference phase and injects model residual streams to enhance model performance. Experiments demonstrate that our proposed method achieves outstanding performance across multiple text classification tasks. Compared to traditional methods, IFed-ICL avoids the extensive parameter updates required by conventional fine-tuning methods while reducing data transmission and local computation at the client level in federated learning. This enables efficient distributed context learning using local private-domain data, significantly improving model performance on specific tasks.

As language models grow more influential and trusted in our society, our ability to reliably steer them toward favorable behaviors becomes increasingly paramount. For this, we investigate the technique of steering vectors: biasing the forward pass of language models using a "steering vector" derived from a specific task. We apply them to steer language models toward performing Chain of Thought (CoT) Reasoning without the need to prompt through natural language. We demonstrate this approach on Llama3 8b and Mistral 7b v0.2, and obtain competitive results compared to CoT-prompted performances on a series of reasoning benchmarks (GSM8k, MMLU, AGI Eval, ARC AI2) and qualitative examples. We find this approach yields consistent steering towards CoT responses and takes less compute than traditional methods of fine-tuning models towards CoT.

Current large language models have dangerous capabilities, which are likely to become more problematic in the future. Activation steering techniques can be used to reduce risks from these capabilities. In this paper, we investigate the efficacy of activation steering for broad skills and multiple behaviours. First, by comparing the effects of reducing performance on general coding ability and Python-specific ability, we find that steering broader skills is competitive to steering narrower skills. Second, we steer models to become more or less myopic and wealth-seeking, among other behaviours. In our experiments, combining steering vectors for multiple different behaviours into one steering vector is largely unsuccessful. On the other hand, injecting individual steering vectors at different places in a model simultaneously is promising.