arXiv Machine Learning

Dynamically Scaled Activation Steering

arXiv:2512. 03661v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Activation steering has emerged as a powerful method for guiding the behavior of generative models towards desired outcomes such as toxicity mitigation.

arXiv AI
Jul 23

OPIUM: Mitigating Steering Externalities and Over-Refusal via Dual Objective Latent Optimization

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 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
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 AI
1d ago

DiSCO: Defending text-to-image generation through distribution-guided contrastive prompt optimization

arXiv:2608. 17067v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As text-to-image generative models advance, they raise critical safety concerns, particularly the generation of Not-Safe-For-Work (NSFW) content such as violence and nudity, further exacerbated by red-teaming adversarial attacks.

By Tong Zhang, Motasem Alfarra, Carlos Hinojosa, Christos Louizos, Bernard Ghanem
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.