Activation steering can modify language-model behavior without parameter updates, but behavioral efficacy alone does not determine whether an intervention is usable. Contrastive Activation Addition (C...
arXiv:2611.06001v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Activation steering can modify language-model behavior without parameter updates, but behavioral efficacy alone does not determine whether an intervent...
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...
The paper introduces GAPS, a dimension‑level gating approach for activation steering in language models. GAPS uses two training‑free gates—a static separability gate based on AUROC and a dynamic posterior gate based on a Gaussian model—to selectively apply steering vectors only to neurons that carry reliable concept information or are currently mis‑activated. Experiments on Gemma‑3 and Qwen‑3 show that GAPS improves or matches the performance of token‑level methods, notably reducing Gemma‑3’s toxicity rate from 6.52% to 0.48% under a fixed capability budget.
Activation steering suppresses undesired behaviors in language models by adding a steering vector to the hidden state during generation. Recent conditional methods such as CAST and DSAS improve the be...
arXiv:2607. 25907v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Activation steering controls model behavior by editing internal activations at inference time.
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.
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.
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.
arXiv:2609.00051v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Despite extensive alignment efforts, Large Language Models (LLMs) remain vulnerable to generating unsafe content under adversarial prompting, yet the...
UpSafe°C is a unified framework that enhances large language model safety by upcycling safety‑critical layers into a sparse Mixture‑of‑Experts structure, with a router acting as a soft guardrail. It employs a two‑stage supervised fine‑tuning strategy to improve safety discrimination while preserving general capabilities, and introduces a safety temperature mechanism for dynamic inference‑time control of the safety‑utility trade‑off. Experiments across multiple benchmarks and model scales show robust safety improvements against harmful and jailbreak inputs while maintaining competitive general performance.
RealControlBench is a new benchmark that evaluates fine‑grained steering of large language models and agents across diverse behavioral targets and interaction settings. It extends beyond isolated generation tasks to include complex, execution‑grounded, multi‑turn agent interactions, covering instruction‑following control, tool‑use decision control, reasoning performance, reasoning length, and safety awareness. The benchmark jointly measures target controllability and capability preservation, testing robustness across prompts, domains, and model architectures, and finds that current steering methods are often unreliable in realistic scenarios.