How to choose the default folder when executing the "styles" and "scripts" functions of Elixir?

Using Laravel Elixir, I usually use the styles and scripts functions to concatenate the assets to a single file. However, it seems that by default these two functions try to read files from the resources/assets folder.

Whenever I need to do these operations in the node_modules folder, I need to put "colon" in the file path, which makes the task quite tedious.

My file gulpfile.js looks like this:

elixir(function (mix) {

    mix.styles([
        '../../../node_modules/admin-lte/dist/css/AdminLTE.css',
        '../../../node_modules/admin-lte/dist/css/skins/_all-skins.css',
        '../../../node_modules/ionicons/dist/css/ionicons.css'
    ], 'public/css/_compiled.css');
});

Is there any way to set the default folder of reading these files, so I avoid repeating ../../../node_modules/ ?