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:2608.21664v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Safe deployment of increasingly capable models will likely come to rely on latent-space monitoring as a complement to behavioral evaluations, especiall...
By Marek Mateusz Kowalski, Joshua Fonseca Rivera, Uzay Macar, David Demitri Africa
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:2607. 25907v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Activation steering controls model behavior by editing internal activations at inference time.
By Deepanshu Mody, Samarth Agarwal, Utkarsh Mittal, Dipesh Mahato
arXiv:2607. 14943v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: World Action Models (WAMs) enable semantically- and physically-informed control but are brittle under distribution shift.
By Jihoon Hong, Julian Skifstad, Qiyue Dai, Alice Chan, Glen Chou
GeoSteer introduces a geometry-aware, optimization-based approach to norm-preserving activation steering in large language models. By formulating steering as a Riemannian optimization problem, it updates activations through a sequence of small geodesic steps guided by a learned nonlinear objective, avoiding fixed steering directions. Experiments on TruthfulQA, RealToxicityPrompts, and UltraFeedback show that GeoSteer consistently outperforms existing activation steering baselines, offering smoother, more stable, and more consistent steering behavior.
By Xuan Cuong Ngo, Hao Vo, Ngan Le
arXiv:2606. 15092v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Activation steering has emerged as a key methodology for controlling the behavior of large language models (LLMs).
By Minh-Hieu Pham, Bach Do, Laziz Abdullaev, Tan Minh Nguyen, Khoat Than
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: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
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
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. 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