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Signatures of Steerability in Activation Space of Language Models

arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · article · Sep 12, 2026 · UTC

Steering language models using a set of contrastive representations has been a canonical and computationally efficient method for controlling model behavior. Despite this success in controlling certain model behaviors, the effectiveness of activation steering varies markedly across concepts; the generalization properties of steering vectors are often considered a function of the dataset used to construct them. We make this dataset-dependence claim more rigorous and show that simple separation metrics strongly correlate with the downstream steerability of language models across diverse settings

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First collected: 2026-09-20T12:41:04.663Z. This is not the publication date.