arXiv AI By Ziming Li, Jiatan Huang, Xiaoguang Guo, Guiling Wang, Chuxu Zhang

Same Signal, Opposite Meaning: Direction-Informed Adaptive Learning for LLM Agents

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arXiv Machine Learning
5d ago

Steering Vectors as a Training Signal in LLM Post-Training

Steering vectors (SVs) are residual-stream directions that can shift LLM behavior when added to hidden states during inference. This study investigates whether the same SVs can guide parameter updates during post‑training, exploring supervised learning (SFT and distillation) and reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR). The authors find that SV injection improves performance over plain SFT and distillation, achieving up to a 12% gain in certain distillation settings, and that applying a correctness‑contrast direction as advantage repair in RL recovers learning signals for held‑out math benchmarks. They also identify failure boundaries related to code generation, cross‑family layer transfer, and inference‑time application on SV‑trained checkpoints.

By Tiejin Chen, Maunil Vyas, Huaiyuan Yao, Hua Wei