arXiv Computation and Language

Information-Theoretic Design of Sparse Autoencoder-Based Steering

The paper introduces an information‑theoretic framework for designing sparse autoencoder‑based steering interventions in large language models. It uses the Jensen–Shannon divergence between empirical feature‑firing distributions to quantify how much a state deviates from a target distribution and to construct steering vectors that guide hidden states toward desired firing patterns. Experiments demonstrate the method’s effectiveness in question‑mode generation, show structured downstream effects of local interventions, and apply the framework to safety‑related feature analysis.

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
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 10

When is Your LLM Steerable?

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.