arXiv:2608. 11227v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Activation steering modifies a language model by adding a learned direction to its hidden activations, enabling targeted behavioral changes without retraining.
arXiv:2606. 11599v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Activation steering offers a lightweight approach to control language models' behavior at inference time, but whether it succeeds or fails heavily depends on the prompt, concept, model, and steering configuration.
arXiv:2606. 08682v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Activation steering has emerged as a popular inference-time technique for modulating the behavior of large language models (LLMs).
Activation steering offers a lightweight approach to control language models' behavior at inference time, but whether it succeeds or fails heavily depends on the prompt, concept, model, and steering configuration. Finding the regime and boundaries of successful steering typically requires expensive grid searches and post-hoc evaluation of full autoregressive rollouts.
arXiv:2602. 02712v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A popular approach to post-training control of large language models (LLMs) is the steering of intermediate latent representations.
arXiv:2607. 19806v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Activation steering provides a lightweight mechanism for controlling large language models at inference time, but steering vectors can have unintended externalities: utility vectors may weaken safety behavior, while refusal vectors may induce over-refusal on benign prompts.
arXiv:2607. 26820v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) evolve from standalone assistants into autonomous agents, ensuring their safety requires shifting beyond pointwise risk assessment to understand how risks emerge and unfold over long-horizon trajectories.
arXiv:2606. 08454v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Activation steering provides a lightweight inference-time mechanism for controlling large language models (LLMs) by modifying their internal activation vectors toward desired behaviors.
MetaSteer is a new method for steering large language models that learns nonlinear, context-dependent interventions applied to attention projection matrices. Unlike traditional linear, context-independent techniques, MetaSteer adapts its effects based on the input, requiring no linear concept-geometry assumption. Trained once on a pooled preference corpus, it transfers zero‑shot to unseen concepts and out‑of‑distribution contexts, matching or surpassing strong task‑specific baselines on multiple benchmarks and model families.
arXiv:2602. 06941v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models can recover mid-generation from task-misaligned activation steering, producing explicit verbal restarts (e.
arXiv:2509. 03647v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) increasingly serve as automated evaluators, yet they suffer from "self-preference bias": a tendency to favor their own outputs over those of other models.
arXiv:2606. 11172v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deployed large reasoning models (LRMs) often behave unexpectedly.
The paper introduces CAM-Steer, a Category‑Adaptive Multi‑category Safety Steering framework that estimates risk for each harm category by comparing hidden states to safe and unsafe prototypes. It then combines safety directions into a single steering vector and applies a rotation whose angle is set by the estimated risks, preserving the hidden‑state norm. Experiments on three LLM backbones and seven harm categories show that CAM‑Steer outperforms baselines in defense success rate, even when multiple harm categories co‑occur, with negligible inference overhead.