arXiv AI

Signatures of Steerability in Activation Space of Language Models

arXiv AI
Jun 2

Concept Heterogeneity-aware Representation Steering

arXiv:2603. 02237v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Representation steering offers a lightweight mechanism for controlling the behavior of large language models (LLMs) by intervening on internal activations at inference time.

By Laziz U. Abdullaev, Noelle Y. L. Wong, Ryan T. Z. Lee, Shiqi Jiang, Khoi N. M. Nguyen, Tan M. Nguyen
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 9

Towards Understanding Steering Strength

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 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
Oct 15

Genesis Steering: Better Activation Steering Through Training Data

The paper introduces genesis steering, a method that derives a steering vector from contrastive examples in a model’s own fine‑tuning data, and proposes using membership inference to build proxy datasets when such data are unavailable. Two theoretical results are presented on optimal displacement to the decision boundary and reduced proxy‑estimation bias. Experiments on T"ulu‑3‑8B and Llama‑3.1‑8B‑Instruct show that safety data from T"ulu‑3‑8B’s training mixture produce stronger steering than external datasets, and that membership‑based proxy construction can achieve competitive performance.

By Tora Bodin, Eric Aubinais, Ilaria Torre, Chih-Hong Cheng
arXiv Computation and Language
3d ago

TopoSteer: Topological Layer Selection for Activation Steering in LLMs

TopoSteer introduces a topology-based method for selecting the layer at which to apply activation steering in large language models. Instead of evaluating separability or alignment, it scores layers by the total H_0 persistence of the displacement cloud, measured as the length of its Euclidean minimum spanning tree. Experiments across several models and tasks show that this approach yields more effective steering without needing held-out validation.

By Tuc Nguyen, Marcos Guti\'errez-del-Pozo, Eduardo Paluzo-Hidalgo, Yifan Hu, Adaku Uchendu, Thai Le
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