Hallucination has emerged as a pivotal challenge of Large Language Models (LLMs) that generate plausible yet non‑factual content, significantly impeding the trustworthy AI applications in real-world scenarios like medical diagnosis and autonomous driving. Editing the internal activations of LLMs during inference has shown promising effectiveness in mitigating hallucinations with minimal cost. However, previous editing approaches neglect the query‑specific inference pathways that require tailored truthful steering vectors, resulting in suboptimal hallucination mitigation. To address these issues, we propose the Query-Routed Activation Editing (QRAE) framework, which comprises Divergence-sensitive Head Routing (DHR) and Truth-hierarchical Preference Steering (TPS), to fully leverage query-specific semantics for adaptive activation editing. Specifically, DHR is proposed to establish a query-aware head selection criterion, thereby dynamically routing to truth-critical attention heads. Subsequently, TPS introduces a query-specific steering vector calibration policy with the guidance of progressive truth-preferred optimization, enabling precise and adaptive editing for each distinct query. Extensive experiments on the widely recognized TruthfulQA benchmark demonstrate that QRAE outperforms SOTA methods by up to 13.2% in MC1. Meanwhile, QRAE demonstrates strong generalization to out-of-distribution TriviaQA and Natural Questions benchmarks.

Intervening the internal activations of large language models (LLMs) provides an effective inference-time alignment approach to mitigate undesirable behaviors, such as generating erroneous or harmful content, thereby ensuring safe and reliable applications of LLMs.However, previous methods neglect the misalignment discrepancy among varied tokens, resulting in deviant alignment direction and inflexible editing strength.To address these issues, we propose a token-aware editing (TAE) approach to fully utilize token-level alignment information in the activation space, therefore realizing superior post-intervention performance.Specifically, a Mutual Information-guided Graph Aggregation (MIG) module first develops an MI-guided graph to exploit the tokens' informative interaction for activation enrichment, thus improving alignment probing and facilitating intervention.Subsequently, Misalignment-aware Adaptive Intervention (MAI) comprehensively perceives the token-level misalignment degree from token representation and prediction to guide the adaptive adjustment of editing strength, thereby enhancing final alignment performance.Extensive experiments on three alignment capabilities demonstrate the efficacy of TAE, notably surpassing baseline by 25.8% on the primary metric of truthfulness with minimal cost. 1 MHSA