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: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: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:2602. 02712v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A popular approach to post-training control of large language models (LLMs) is the steering of intermediate latent representations.
By Magamed Taimeskhanov, Samuel Vaiter, Damien Garreau
arXiv:2607. 25270v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Activation steering controls language models by adding vectors or features to hidden states at inference time, but the upstream source of these steering signals is often treated as a secondary detail.
By Jiaran Ye, Lingxu Ran, Zijun Yao, Chenpeng Wang, Yong Jiang, Lei Hou, Juanzi Li, Liangming Pan
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: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:2602.01654v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Steering vectors (SVs) offer a lightweight way to control large language models (LLMs) at inference time by shifting hidden activations, providing...
By Jiaqian Li, Yanshu Li, Kuan-Hao Huang
arXiv:2606. 26155v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Interpreting and controlling model behaviors through activation steering methods requires many pairs of contrastive samples that clearly exhibit desired or undesired behavior.
By Maty Bohacek, Rishub Jain, Nicholas Dufour, Thomas Leung, Chris Bregler, Roma Patel
arXiv:2608. 02957v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Steering vectors (SVs) are widely used to influence the expression of concepts (e.
By Max Torop, Aria Masoomi, Jennifer Dy
arXiv:2601. 02896v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Controlling emergent behavioral personas (e.
By Harshvardhan Saini, Yiming Tang, Dianbo Liu
The paper introduces Minimally Invasive Steering Vector Optimization (MISVO), a method that adjusts a frozen language model’s final hidden states by adding vectors to steer outputs toward a test‑time reward while penalizing changes using the local KL geometry of the token distribution. MISVO derives an analytic Fisher term and a suffix score‑function term, showing that the suffix term is second‑order and that Fisher surrogates match the full KL gradient to first order. Experiments on preference and code‑generation tasks with 1B–14B parameter models demonstrate that MISVO achieves the highest mean reward in most settings while maintaining diversity and coherence comparable to Best‑of‑N.
By Taha Entesari, Jingyu Zhang, Daniel Khashabi, Mahyar Fazlyab