arXiv Machine Learning

Where to Steer: Input-Dependent Layer Selection for Steering Improves LLM Alignment

arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 11

When is Your LLM Steerable?

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.

By Chenrui Fan, Yize Cheng, Ming Li, Soheil Feizi, Tianyi Zhou
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 10

When is Your LLM Steerable?

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 Machine Learning
Jun 15

Towards Steering without Sacrifice: Principled Training of Steering Vectors for Prompt-only Interventions

arXiv:2605. 05983v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recently, steering vectors (SVs) have emerged as an effective and lightweight approach to steer behaviors of large language models (LLMs), among which fine-tuned SVs are more effective than optimization-free ones.

By Yuntai Bao, Qinfeng Li, Xinyan Yu, Ge Su, Wenqi Zhang, Liu Yan, Haiqin Weng, Jianwei Yin, Xuhong Zhang
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 8

Learning Cross-Model Activation Alignments with Explicit Many-to-Many Layer Maps

The paper introduces MATCHA, a method that learns explicit many-to-many layer maps between independently trained language models. MATCHA decomposes the alignment into a layer map—an explicit target‑by‑source matrix—and a shared feature map, allowing joint learning of layer correspondence and feature transformation from prompts. Experiments on 42 model pairs across three families show that MATCHA reconstructs target activations more faithfully and improves retrieval metrics, while enabling transfer of activation‑space interventions between models.

By Alina Sudakov, Guy Bar-Shalom, Fabrizio Frasca, Haggai Maron
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 1

MetaSteer: Context-Conditioned, nonlinear Steering via Attention-Projection Adaptation

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.

By Mehdi Jafari, Hao Xue, Flora Salim
arXiv AI
Sep 10

Steering Geometry: Validating Human Value Geometry in LLM Steering Space

arXiv:2609.06289v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in alignment-sensitive contexts, activation steering has emerged as a lightweight, inferenc...

By Mohammad Mahdi Abootorabi, Armin Saghafian, Ali Bazshoushtari, Hamid Rezaei, EunJeong Hwang, Vered Shwartz, Parvin Mousavi, Purang Abolmaesumi