IDEA: training-free Input-Dependent stEEring via Activation cluster matching (IDEEA) is a method that steers large language models by injecting bias into selected activations at inference time, without requiring weight updates. Unlike existing training-free steering approaches that use a single, input-independent direction, IDEEA clusters positive and negative activation supports per attention head and solves an optimal-matching problem to create a set of cluster-conditional directions. At inference, IDEEA selects the direction that best matches the input’s activation, aligning the model toward a target concept while preserving the input’s original representation, and achieves a 9.9% average improvement in truth × info rate on TruthfulQA compared to the best input-independent baseline.
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:2605. 05983v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recently, steering vectors (SVs) have emerged as an effective and lightweight approach to steer behaviors of large language models (LLMs), among which fine-tuned SVs are more effective than optimization-free ones.
By Yuntai Bao, Qinfeng Li, Xinyan Yu, Ge Su, Wenqi Zhang, Liu Yan, Haiqin Weng, Jianwei Yin, Xuhong Zhang
arXiv:2606. 15092v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Activation steering has emerged as a key methodology for controlling the behavior of large language models (LLMs).
By Minh-Hieu Pham, Bach Do, Laziz Abdullaev, Tan Minh Nguyen, Khoat Than
arXiv:2509. 03647v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) increasingly serve as automated evaluators, yet they suffer from "self-preference bias": a tendency to favor their own outputs over those of other models.
By Dani Roytburg, Matthew Bozoukov, Matthew Nguyen, Jou Barzdukas, Simon Fu, Narmeen Oozeer
arXiv:2510. 05342v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has emerged as a simple and effective method for aligning large language models.
By Hyung Gyu Rho