Hugging Face Trending Papers

How Far Can You Steer? Behavior-Capability Frontiers in Contrastive Activation Addition

arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 21

RealControlBench: A Benchmark for Interpretability-Informed Fine-Grained Control of LLMs and Agents

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.

By Xinying Cai, Bin Hu, Mingyu Jin, Qiming Zhang, Yang Ouyang, Bangwei Guo, Minghao Guo, Yutong Yin, Lang Gao, Feijiang Han, Sheldon Yu, Kaiqu Liang, Qingcheng Zeng, Jingcheng Niu, Fan Yang, Wei Cheng, Zhen Xiang, Julian McAuley, Zhaoran Wang
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 1

MetaSteer: Context-Conditioned, nonlinear Steering via Attention-Projection Adaptation

MetaSteer is a new method for steering large language models that learns nonlinear, context-dependent interventions applied to attention projection matrices. Unlike traditional linear, context-independent techniques, MetaSteer adapts its effects based on the input, requiring no linear concept-geometry assumption. Trained once on a pooled preference corpus, it transfers zero‑shot to unseen concepts and out‑of‑distribution contexts, matching or surpassing strong task‑specific baselines on multiple benchmarks and model families.

By Mehdi Jafari, Hao Xue, Flora Salim
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