Language Model Steering

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Language model steering studies how to make a pretrained model change a particular behavior—such as tone, refusal, truthfulness, reasoning, or language—without necessarily retraining its weights. Common approaches add contrastive activation vectors, target sparse features or specific neurons and attention heads, or adapt interventions to the prompt and the model’s evolving state; other methods guide logits, decoding, or agent-level decisions. Researchers evaluate these methods on tasks ranging from safety and factuality to personalization, multilingual generation, and reasoning, measuring both target behavior and preservation of general capabilities. A central open challenge is reliable, selective control: a behavior may be readable in activations yet resist intervention, while steering can cause collateral quality loss, prompt sensitivity, or safety trade-offs.

Latest papers

283 papers51 papers in the last four weeks, up 65% on the four weeks before. 0.3% of all new papers.

Adaptive Probe-based Steering for Robust LLM Jailbreaking
May 19, 2026Junxi Chen, Junhao Dong, Xiaohua XieLanguage Model Steering Adversarial Attacks on LLMs
School of Computer Science and Engineering, Sun Yat-Sen University, China · Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
FishBack: Pullback Fisher Geometry for Optimal Activation Steering in Transformers
May 17, 2026Sihan Wang, Jiayi ZhaoInformation Geometry Language Model Steering
South China University of Technology
VSPO: Vector-Steered Policy Optimization for Behavioral Control
May 15, 2026Xuechen Zhang, Zijian Huang, Kai Yang +3Language Model Steering RL for Language Model Reasoning
University of Michigan
Selective Safety Steering via Value-Filtered Decoding
May 14, 2026Bat-Sheva Einbinder, Hen Davidov, Yee Whye Teh +2Language Model Decoding Language Model Steering
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Technion IIT, Israel · Department of Statistics, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK · OATML, Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK +1
WriteSAE: Sparse Autoencoders for Recurrent State
May 12, 2026Jack YoungRecurrent Language Models Language Model Steering
Indiana University
Targeted Neuron Modulation via Contrastive Pair Search
May 12, 2026Sam Herring, Jake Naviasky, Karan MalhotraLanguage Model Steering LLM Interpretability
Nous Research
Prompt-Activation Duality: Improving Activation Steering via Attention-Level Interventions
May 11, 2026Diancheng Kang, Zheyuan Liu, Ningshan Ma +3Language Model Steering Self-Attention
1Southern University of Science and Technology · University of Notre Dame · 3Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Do LLMs Experience an Internal Polylogue? Investigating Reasoning through the Lens of Personas
May 9, 2026Nils A. Herrmann, Leander Girrbach, Kirill Bykov +1Language Model Steering LLM Interpretability
1Technical University of Munich · 2Helmholtz Munich · 3Munich
Why Do Aligned LLMs Remain Jailbreakable: Refusal-Escape Directions, Operator-Level Sources, and Safety-Utility Trade-off
May 9, 2026Yu Chen, Yuanhao Liu, Qi CaoLLM Alignment Language Model Steering
Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences · University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China
Can Revealed Preferences Clarify LLM Alignment and Steering?
May 8, 2026Khurram Yamin, Jingjing Tang, Eric Horvitz +1Language Model Steering LLM Decision-Making
1Carnegie Mellon University · 2Microsoft Research
Steering Without Breaking: Mechanistically Informed Interventions for Discrete Diffusion Language Models
May 8, 2026Hanhan Zhou, Shamik Roy, Rashmi GangadharaiahLanguage Model Steering Diffusion Language Model Decoding
AWS AI Labs Santa Clara, CA 95054
CLIPer: Tailoring Diverse User Preference via Classifier-Guided Inference-Time Personalization
May 8, 2026Jinyan Su, Jinpeng Zhou, Claire Cardie +1Language Model Steering LLM Personalization
Cornell University
Crafting Reversible SFT Behaviors in Large Language Models
May 7, 2026Yuping Lin, Pengfei He, Yue Xing +5Supervised Fine-Tuning Language Model Steering
Michigan State University · Hippocratic AI · University of Georgia
Don't Lose Focus: Activation Steering via Key-Orthogonal Projections
May 7, 2026Haoyan Luo, Mateo Espinosa Zarlenga, Mateja JamnikLanguage Model Steering Self-Attention
University of Cambridge · University of Oxford
Memory Inception: Latent-Space KV Cache Manipulation for Steering LLMs
May 7, 2026Andy Zeyi Liu, Michael Zhang, Ilana Greenberg +3Language Model Steering Memory-Augmented Language Models
Yale University · Princeton University · Jump Trading
Towards Steering without Sacrifice: Principled Training of Steering Vectors for Prompt-only Interventions
May 7, 2026Yuntai Bao, Qinfeng Li, Xinyan Yu +6Language Model Steering Causal Interventions in Language Models
Zhejiang University · Innovation and Management Center, School of Software Technology (Ningbo), Zhejiang University · Ant Group
Beyond Steering Vector: Flow-based Activation Steering for Inference-Time Intervention
May 7, 2026Zehao Jin, Ruixuan Deng, Junran Wang +2Language Model Steering Activation Steering
Georgia Institute of Technology
Decodable but Not Corrected by Fixed Residual-Stream Linear Steering: Evidence from Medical LLM Failure Regimes
May 7, 2026Ming LiuLanguage Model Steering Medical LLMs
Amazon
Conceptors for Semantic Steering
May 6, 2026Ilias Triantafyllopoulos, Young-Min Cho, Ren Tao +6Language Model Steering Representation Steering
1New York University · University of Pennsylvania
Steer Like the LLM: Activation Steering that Mimics Prompting
May 5, 2026Geert Heyman, Frederik VandeputteLanguage Model Steering LLM Prompting
Nokia Bell Labs, Belgium.
Where Paths Split: Localized, Calibrated Control of Moral Reasoning in Large Language Models
May 5, 2026Chenchen Yuan, Zheyu Zhang, Gjergji KasneciLLM Alignment Moral Reasoning in Language Models
School of Computation, Information and Technology, Technical University of Munich · School of Social Sciences and Technology, Technical University of Munich · Munich Center for Machine Learning (MCML)
Mitigating Misalignment Contagion by Steering with Implicit Traits
May 4, 2026Maria Chang, Ronny Luss, Miao Liu +3LLM Alignment Language Model Steering
IBM Research Yorktown Heights, NY 10598, USA
LLM-Augmented Semantic Steering of Text Embedding Projection Spaces
May 3, 2026Wei Liu, Eric Krokos, Kirsten Whitley +2Text Embeddings Language Model Steering
Virginia Tech Blacksburg, Virginia, USA · Department of Defense Washington, DC, USA · Tulane University New Orleans, Louisiana, USA
The Cylindrical Representation Hypothesis for Language Model Steering
May 3, 2026Lang Gao, Jinghui Zhang, Wei Liu +7Language Model Steering LLM Interpretability
Department of Natural Language Processing, Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, Abu Dhabi, UAE · Department of Computer Science, National University of Singapore, Singapore
Minimizing Collateral Damage in Activation Steering
May 1, 2026Tam Nguyen, Tu Anh Nguyen, Sina Alemohammad +1Language Model Steering Activation Steering
Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, Rice University, Houston, USA · Department of Computational and Applied Mathematics, Rice University, Houston, USA · Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, USA
Escaping Mode Collapse in LLM Generation via Geometric Regulation
May 1, 2026Xin Du, Kumiko Tanaka-IshiiLanguage Model Steering Decoder-Only Language Models
Department of Communications and Computer Engineering, Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan · Shanghai Research Institute for Intelligent Autonomous Systems, Tongji University, Shanghai, China · Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan
Subliminal Steering: Stronger Encoding of Hidden Signals
Apr 28, 2026George Morgulis, John HewittLanguage Model Steering Subliminal Learning
Columbia University
Investigating Linguistic Steering: An Analysis of Adjectival Effects Across Large Language Model Architectures
Apr 28, 2026Lars MalmqvistPrompt Sensitivity Language Model Steering
Research and Implementation
Contextual Linear Activation Steering of Language Models
Apr 27, 2026Brandon Hsu, Daniel Beaglehole, Adityanarayanan Radhakrishnan +1Language Model Steering LLM Fine-Tuning
UC San Diego · MIT · Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard
Preference Heads in Large Language Models: A Mechanistic Framework for Interpretable Personalization
Apr 24, 2026Weixu Zhang, Ye Yuan, Changjiang Han +7LLM Alignment Language Model Steering
McGill University · Mila - Quebec AI Institute · MBZUAI +2

May 19, 2026J/K move · Enter open · S save

Adaptive Probe-based Steering for Robust LLM Jailbreaking

Junxi Chen, Junhao Dong, Xiaohua Xie

School of Computer Science and Engineering, Sun Yat-Sen University, China · Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

Language Model Steering Adversarial Attacks on LLMs LLM Jailbreak Attacks Adversarial Robustness of Language Models Activation Steering

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Recent work has demonstrated the potential of contrastive steering for jailbreaking Large Language Models (LLMs). However, existing methods rely on limited and inherently biased contrastive prompts and require laborious manual tuning of steering strength, limiting their robustness and effectiveness. In this paper, we leverage the idea of model extraction to guide the learned steering vectors to approximate the ideal one and propose tuning the steering strength adaptively based on contrastive activations' statistics. Experiments demonstrate that our method notably improves the effectiveness and robustness of probe-based steering, without any extra contrastive prompts or laborious manual tuning. Being an attack paper, this paper focuses on revealing the breakdown of fortified LLMs, raising the average harmfulness score from 6% to 70%. Our code is available at https://github.com/fhdnskfbeuv/adaptiveSteering.