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
Oct 16

Where to Steer: Input-Dependent Layer Selection for Steering Improves LLM Alignment

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 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 Computation and Language
Oct 1

MetaSteer: Context-Conditioned, nonlinear Steering via Attention-Projection Adaptation

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