When Steering Shifts Discourse: Identifying and Intervening on Discourse-Level Changes due to Activation Steering in LLMs

The paper investigates how activation steering—adding a vector to a large language model’s residual-stream activations—alters discourse-level aspects of generated text, such as formality, evidence usage, and ambiguity. It demonstrates that these unintended changes can be largely mitigated by applying a second, complementary steering vector that targets the affected discourse dimension, restoring about 78% of the original discourse characteristics while maintaining the intended behavior in roughly 93% of outputs.

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• llms
• safety