arXiv:2512. 03661v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Activation steering has emerged as a powerful method for guiding the behavior of generative models towards desired outcomes such as toxicity mitigation.
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Kernelized Activation Steering (KAS) introduces a training‑free method for controlling attributes of generative models by lifting activation steering into a reproducing kernel Hilbert space. It formulates steering as an optimization problem using only kernel evaluations, producing an implicit, activation‑dependent steering score that adapts locally to the geometry of the activation space. Unlike standard Difference‑in‑Means, KAS generates a nonlinear steering field and recovers DiM as a special case with a linear kernel, achieving comparable or superior performance on tasks such as jailbreaking LLMs and image style control.
arXiv:2509. 25533v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: As Vision Language Models (VLMs) are deployed across safety-critical applications, understanding and controlling their behavioral patterns has become increasingly important.
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.
Steering Fields introduce adaptive vector fields that re-estimate steering directions at each step of a flow-based text-to-image generation process, replacing the fixed global steering vectors traditionally used. By operating on noisy states, they provide a continuous trade-off between steering strength and content preservation, and allow simultaneous induction and inhibition of concepts without explicit spatial masks or object priors. The method achieves state-of-the-art safety steering benchmarks and can also function as a structure-preserving image-editing technique, delivering high semantic fidelity while remaining model-agnostic and inversion-free.
arXiv:2606. 07696v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Activation steering has become a popular training-free method to control LLM behavior by injecting precomputed direction vectors into the model's residual stream at inference time.
arXiv:2607. 19806v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Activation steering provides a lightweight mechanism for controlling large language models at inference time, but steering vectors can have unintended externalities: utility vectors may weaken safety behavior, while refusal vectors may induce over-refusal on benign prompts.