arXiv Computation and Language

Steering Vector Fields for Context-Aware Inference-Time Control in Large Language Models

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 10

Disentangling Steering Vectors

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 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 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 AI
Sep 2

Guided Prompt Evolution for Vision-Language Models Adaptation

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 AI
Sep 10

Training-Free Task Vectors for LLM Behavioral Control

The paper introduces Training-Free Task Vectors (TFTVs), a method for computing task-vector-like directions in large language models without fine‑tuning. TFTVs map activation steering vectors to rank‑one weight‑space edits using only forward‑pass statistics, enabling arithmetic operations such as learning, forgetting, and composing edits. Experiments show that TFTVs consistently amplify, suppress, and combine target behaviors while preserving general knowledge, outperforming other editing and steering baselines.

By Gabriel J. Perin, Lucas Boscaini, Andr\'e Araujo, Nina S. T. Hirata
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.