Avinash Balakrishnan
2026
AI Steerability 360: A Toolkit for Steering Large Language Models
Erik Miehling | Karthikeyan Natesan Ramamurthy | Praveen Venkateswaran | Ching-Yun Ko | Pierre Dognin | Moninder Singh | Tejaswini Pedapati | Avinash Balakrishnan | Matthew Riemer | Dennis Wei | Inge Vejsbjerg | Elizabeth M. Daly | Kush R. Varshney
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 3: System Demonstrations)
Erik Miehling | Karthikeyan Natesan Ramamurthy | Praveen Venkateswaran | Ching-Yun Ko | Pierre Dognin | Moninder Singh | Tejaswini Pedapati | Avinash Balakrishnan | Matthew Riemer | Dennis Wei | Inge Vejsbjerg | Elizabeth M. Daly | Kush R. Varshney
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 3: System Demonstrations)
The AI Steerability 360 toolkit is an extensible, open-source Python library for steering LLMs. Steering abstractions are designed around four model control surfaces: input (modification of the prompt), structural (modification of the model’s weights or architecture), state (modification of the model’s activations and attentions), and output (modification of the decoding or generation process). Steering methods exert control on the model through a common interface, termed a steering pipeline, which additionally allows for the composition of multiple steering methods. Comprehensive evaluation and comparison of steering methods/pipelines is facilitated by use case classes (for defining tasks) and a benchmark class (for performance comparison on a given task). The functionality provided by the toolkit significantly lowers the barrier to developing and comprehensively evaluating steering methods. The toolkit is Hugging Face native and is released under an Apache 2.0 license at https://github.com/IBM/AISteer360.
2018
Word Mover’s Embedding: From Word2Vec to Document Embedding
Lingfei Wu | Ian En-Hsu Yen | Kun Xu | Fangli Xu | Avinash Balakrishnan | Pin-Yu Chen | Pradeep Ravikumar | Michael J. Witbrock
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Lingfei Wu | Ian En-Hsu Yen | Kun Xu | Fangli Xu | Avinash Balakrishnan | Pin-Yu Chen | Pradeep Ravikumar | Michael J. Witbrock
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
While the celebrated Word2Vec technique yields semantically rich representations for individual words, there has been relatively less success in extending to generate unsupervised sentences or documents embeddings. Recent work has demonstrated that a distance measure between documents called Word Mover’s Distance (WMD) that aligns semantically similar words, yields unprecedented KNN classification accuracy. However, WMD is expensive to compute, and it is hard to extend its use beyond a KNN classifier. In this paper, we propose the Word Mover’s Embedding (WME), a novel approach to building an unsupervised document (sentence) embedding from pre-trained word embeddings. In our experiments on 9 benchmark text classification datasets and 22 textual similarity tasks, the proposed technique consistently matches or outperforms state-of-the-art techniques, with significantly higher accuracy on problems of short length.