@article{leino-karlgren-2025-controlling,
    title = "Controlling Language and Style of Multi-lingual Generative Language Models with Control Vectors",
    author = "Leino, Julius  and
      Karlgren, Jussi",
    editor = "Bollmann, Marcel",
    journal = "Northern European Journal of Language Technology",
    volume = "11",
    month = dec,
    year = "2025",
    address = {Link{\"o}ping, Sweden},
    publisher = {Link{\"o}ping University Electronic Press},
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-swisstext/2025.nejlt-1.1/",
    doi = "10.3384/nejlt.2000-1533.2025.5888",
    pages = "1--26",
    abstract = "Control vectors have recently gained popularity as a method for steering transformer-based generative language models. This paper contributes to this path of research by evaluating the robustness of these control vectors in multi- and cross-lingual question-answering settings mimicking the real-world deployment scenario, where models are expected to generate answers to challenging questions. We present a set of experiments to demonstrate that a control vector approach can be used to shift the output of a generative language model from one language to another, and to exercise stylistic control of the output across languages. Overall, we find that the control vector approach offers a relatively lightweight and effective path for developing methods to control the output of multilingual language models with multiple design choices affecting the real-world control performance."
}