Kernelized Activation Steering (KAS) introduces a training‑free method for controlling attributes of generative models by lifting activation steering into a reproducing kernel Hilbert space. It formulates steering as an optimization problem using only kernel evaluations, producing an implicit, activation‑dependent steering score that adapts locally to the geometry of the activation space. Unlike standard Difference‑in‑Means, KAS generates a nonlinear steering field and recovers DiM as a special case with a linear kernel, achieving comparable or superior performance on tasks such as jailbreaking LLMs and image style control.
By Laziz U. Abdullaev, Minh-Hieu Pham, Bach Do, Khoat Than, Tan M. Nguyen
arXiv:2509. 25533v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: As Vision Language Models (VLMs) are deployed across safety-critical applications, understanding and controlling their behavioral patterns has become increasingly important.
By Ravikumar Balakrishnan, Mansi Phute
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.
By Tuc Nguyen, Thai Le
Steering Fields introduce adaptive vector fields that re-estimate steering directions at each step of a flow-based text-to-image generation process, replacing the fixed global steering vectors traditionally used. By operating on noisy states, they provide a continuous trade-off between steering strength and content preservation, and allow simultaneous induction and inhibition of concepts without explicit spatial masks or object priors. The method achieves state-of-the-art safety steering benchmarks and can also function as a structure-preserving image-editing technique, delivering high semantic fidelity while remaining model-agnostic and inversion-free.
By Simone Facchiano, Jan Eric Lenssen, Bernt Schiele, Wolfgang Stammer, Fabio Galasso, Jonas Fischer
arXiv:2606. 07696v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Activation steering has become a popular training-free method to control LLM behavior by injecting precomputed direction vectors into the model's residual stream at inference time.
By Kien Le, Thai Le
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.
By Kavin Aravindan, Arihant Rastogi, Aadi Prasad, Krishak Aneja, Saiyam Jain, Vaishnavi Shivkumar, Ponnurangam Kumaraguru
arXiv:2609.31122v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Activation steering is a powerful training-free paradigm for controlling large language models at inference time. However, standard approaches estimate...
By Irene Tallini, Lorenzo Basile, Valentino Maiorca, Francesco Locatello, Alberto Cazzaniga
UnifiedAttack introduces a benchmark for testing the safety of large multimodal models (LMMs) in tasks that combine text and image to produce harmful content. The benchmark focuses on the additional harm that arises from cross‑modal synergy and includes filtered multimodal samples and synthesized disinformation queries. A synergistic hijacking framework—comprising In‑Context Reskinning (ICR) and Cognitive Planning Injection (CPI)—is proposed to expose vulnerabilities, and extensive evaluations show that UnifiedAttack consistently bypasses current alignment defenses in state‑of‑the‑art architectures.
By Bingjun Luo, Jialin Guo, Tony Wang, Siqi Li
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
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: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.
By Chong Yong Ong, Alson Wei Jie Sim, Peixin Zhang, Jun Sun
arXiv:2507. 18043v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Inference-time steering methods offer a lightweight alternative to fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs) by modifying internal activations at test time without updating model weights.
By Duy Nguyen, Archiki Prasad, Elias Stengel-Eskin, Mohit Bansal