arXiv AI

SAE-StatSteer: Statistical Consensus Feature Selection for Optimization-Free Activation Steering of Large Language Models

arXiv:2607. 19364v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Activation steering adds a residual-stream direction at inference time, providing lightweight behavioral control without fine-tuning.

arXiv AI
Jul 23

Statistically Grounded Sparse-Feature Interventions for Activation-Space Control in Large Language Models

arXiv:2607. 19364v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Activation steering offers a lightweight alternative to fine-tuning for behavioral control of large language models, but SAE-based steering methods often rely on learned steering objectives or single-criterion feature selection.

By Oshayer Siddique, J. M Areeb Uzair Alam, Md Jobayer Rahman Rafy, Syed Rifat Raiyan, Hasan Mahmud, Md Kamrul Hasan
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 Machine Learning
Jun 18

From Sparse Features to Trustworthy Proxies: Certifying SAE-Based Interpretability

arXiv:2606. 18383v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are increasingly used to extract interpretable features from language models (LMs), yet a central question remains: when can an SAE-based explanation be treated as a faithful view of an underlying frozen LM We study this through a post-hoc generalization framework that certifies the LM via a sparse proxy, obtained by replacing a native hidden activation with its pretrained SAE reconstruction.

By Dibyanayan Bandyopadhyay, Asif Ekbal