Terry Ruas
Terry Ruas — researcher or builder tracked in the Angestrom contributor network.
Papers · 2
Is Visual Prompting All You Need? Studying VLM Spatial Reasoning under Progressive Visual Scaffolds
Vision-language models (VLMs) have advanced rapidly in multimodal reasoning, yet recent work shows that their failures often reflect an interaction between visual grounding and downstream reasoning. What remains less clear is how the visual presentation of a task shapes model performance and failure modes when the underlying reasoning problem is unchanged. We study this question in SPaRC, a benchmark for grid-based visual spatial planning, by introducing lightweight input-side scaffolds that preserve the visual modality while making spatial structure more accessible. Across multiple VLMs, thes
BabelSteering: Multilingual Safety Alignment via English Steering Vectors
Large language models (LLMs) are deployed globally in high-stakes settings, yet most safety research and alignment efforts remain concentrated on English. Thus, users interacting with LLMs in other languages may encounter weaker safeguards despite relying on the same systems for similarly sensitive tasks. In this work, we investigate whether safety signals learned from a high-resource language, like English, can improve multilingual safety. We propose BabelSteering, an activation steering method that acts as a lightweight inference- time intervention, using refusal directions derived from Engl