Revealing Behavioral Plasticity in Large Language Models: A Token-Conditional Perspective
In this work, we reveal that Large Language Models (LLMs) possess intrinsic behavioral plasticity-akin to chameleons adapting their coloration to environmental cues-that can be exposed through token-conditional generation and stabilized via reinforcement learning. Specifically, by conditioning generation on carefully selected token prefixes sampled from responses exhibiting desired behaviors, LLMs seamlessly adapt their behavioral modes at inference time (e.g., switching from step-by-step reasoning to direct answering) without retraining. Based on this insight, we propose Token-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning (ToCoRL), a principled framework that leverages RL to internalize this chamel...
| Authors | Liyuan Mao, Le Yu, Jing Zhou et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 9 March 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 9 March 2026 |
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