arXiv:2602. 06941v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models can recover mid-generation from task-misaligned activation steering, producing explicit verbal restarts (e.
By Alex McKenzie, Keenan Pepper, Stijn Servaes, Martin Leitgab, Murat Cubuktepe, Mike Vaiana, Diogo de Lucena, Judd Rosenblatt, Michael S. A. Graziano
arXiv:2608.21664v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Safe deployment of increasingly capable models will likely come to rely on latent-space monitoring as a complement to behavioral evaluations, especiall...
By Marek Mateusz Kowalski, Joshua Fonseca Rivera, Uzay Macar, David Demitri Africa
arXiv:2606. 08682v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Activation steering has emerged as a popular inference-time technique for modulating the behavior of large language models (LLMs).
By Qi Cao, Jian Lou, Meiting Liu, Wenjie Feng, Dan Li, See-Kiong Ng, Anh Tuan Luu
arXiv:2607. 14111v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Can small language models detect and report on perturbations their own internal activations?
By Ely Hahami, Ishaan Sinha, Lavik Jain
arXiv:2608.21766v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Both capability and safety benchmarks rest upon the assumption that the behavior of language models undergoing a test is informative about their beha...
By Farzaneh Heidari, Amin Memarian, Guillaume Rabusseau
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.
By Tuc Nguyen, Thai Le
arXiv:2507. 18043v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Inference-time steering methods offer a lightweight alternative to fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs) by modifying internal activations at test time without updating model weights.
By Duy Nguyen, Archiki Prasad, Elias Stengel-Eskin, Mohit Bansal
arXiv:2603. 03824v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Humans often become more self-aware under threat, yet can lose self-awareness when absorbed in a task; we hypothesize that language models exhibit environment-dependent \textit{evaluation awareness}.
By Maheep Chaudhary
arXiv:2606. 19831v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Aligned language models gate behaviors such as refusal and language routing through sparse feed forward neurons, yet no theory predicts when a single neuron intervention controls a behavior coherently rather than collapsing the output.
By Hongliang Liu
The paper introduces Latent Space Refusal Anchoring (LSR‑Anchoring), a training‑free technique that extracts a refusal direction from English prompts and applies it to the residual stream of instruction‑tuned models at inference time. The primary variant, Mean‑Activation Steering (MAS), works across several architectures (Llama‑3‑8B, Llama‑3.1‑70B, Mistral‑7B‑Instruct, Qwen2.5‑7B), restoring safety for low‑resource African languages with minimal performance loss, while a refined SAE‑Derived Steering (SDS) further reduces KL divergence without degrading legitimate prompt performance. The method shows positive transfer for Yoruba, Igbo, Igala, and Hausa, but fails for Arabic, suggesting a geometric mismatch rather than a data scarcity issue.
By Godwin Abuh Faruna
arXiv:2609.00064v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: In-context learning (ICL) lets large language models adapt to new tasks from demonstrations, and fine-tuning can erode this behaviour. Many preservat...
By Jinyuan Zhang, Peng He, He Hu, Yin Yuan, ShengShuo Jiao
arXiv:2608. 08829v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Activation steering edits the behaviour of a frozen language model by adding a learned vector to its residual stream, and current practice fixes the injection layers globally per task.
By Muhammad Faishal Adly Nelwan, Alfan Farizki Wicaksono