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
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: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
arXiv:2508. 08521v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly being used in a broad range of applications, bringing their security and behavioral control to the forefront.
By Mansi Phute, Ravikumar Balakrishnan
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
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: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).
By Qi Cao, Jian Lou, Meiting Liu, Wenjie Feng, Dan Li, See-Kiong Ng, Anh Tuan Luu