cs.LGJun 4, 2026

Steering Vectors are an Adversarial Attack Surface

Authors: Abzal AidakhmetovDonato CrisostomiTommaso MencattiniAdrian Robert MinutIacopo MasiEmanuele Rodolà

Organizations: 1Sapienza University of Rome · 2EPFL

Abstract

Activation steering has become a popular way to control Large Language Model (LLM) behavior without fine-tuning. Since the technique is plug-and-play, users share datasets and precomputed vectors to steer model activations. However, we show that a \emph{stealth data poisoning attack} silently compromises this pipeline. By substituting 46%4{-}6\% of tokens in the steering dataset, an attacker can silently align the resulting vector with an anti-refusal direction. This jailbreaks the target model while preserving the intended steering effect on benign prompts. Under this threat model, a malicious actor can distribute an apparently safe bundle containing texts, vectors, and weights, alongside an equivalence certificate that the end-user can verify. We test the attack on two open-weight model families and eight model-attribute combinations, observing that poisoned vectors reach an absolute attack success rate (ASR) of 2055%20{-}55\%, +19%+19\% to +51%+51\% over a clean reference. Finally, we find that a refusal-direction orthogonalization defense can recover 82%{\approx}82\% of the ASR gap without harming benign behavior.

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