arXiv:2604.24693v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Linear activation steering is a powerful approach for controlling and specializing large language models by adding linear representations of concep...
By Brandon Hsu, Daniel Beaglehole, Adityanarayanan Radhakrishnan, Mikhail Belkin
arXiv:2609.07037v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Activation steering has emerged as a lightweight, inference-time approach to control the behavior of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, traditional...
By Takeru Hiramatsu, Kyohei Atarashi, Koh Takeuchi, Hisashi Kashima
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:2601. 03093v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent work on activation and latent steering has demonstrated that modifying internal representations can effectively guide large language models (LLMs) toward improved reasoning and efficiency without updating model parameters.
By Tuc Nguyen, Thai Le
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
The paper introduces Where to Steer (W2S), a framework that adaptively selects which layer of a large language model to intervene on based on the input. It argues that optimal steering layers vary across inputs and demonstrates that W2S outperforms fixed-layer steering methods on several LLMs and alignment tasks, both in‑distribution and out‑of‑distribution. The study highlights input‑dependent layer selection as a complementary design dimension to steering vector extraction.
By Soham Gadgil, Chris Lin, Su-In Lee
arXiv:2502. 12446v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Inference-time intervention (ITI) has emerged as a promising method for steering large language model (LLM) behavior in a particular direction (e.
By Duy Nguyen, Archiki Prasad, Elias Stengel-Eskin, Mohit Bansal
arXiv:2602.09870v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Steering methods influence Large Language Model behavior by identifying semantic directions in hidden representations, but are typically realized t...
By Chung-En Sun, Ge Yan, Zimo Wang, Tsui-Wei Weng
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
The paper introduces EvoPrompt, a framework for adapting vision‑language models to new tasks with limited data while preventing catastrophic forgetting. EvoPrompt uses a Modality‑Shared Prompt Projector to create hierarchical prompts and an evolutionary training strategy that separates low‑rank updates into directional and magnitude components, preserving learned semantic directions. Experiments show that EvoPrompt achieves state‑of‑the‑art few‑shot performance while maintaining the original zero‑shot capabilities of the pre‑trained models.
By Enming Zhang, Jiayang Li, Yanlong Wang, Yanru Wu, Zhenyu Liu, Yang Li
arXiv:2603. 09493v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The adaptation of large-scale vision-language models (VLMs) to downstream tasks with limited labeled data remains a significant challenge.
By Enming Zhang, Jiayang Li, Yanlong Wang, Yanru Wu, Zhenyu Liu, Yang Li
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