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Empathy Is Steerable but Multi-Axial: Mechanism Geometry and Persona Effects in LLMs

arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · article · Sep 14, 2026 · UTC

Activation steering has been used to control traits such as honesty, refusal, and sycophancy, yet supportive empathy is evaluated along multiple dimensions that need not correspond to independently controllable activation directions. Using the EPITOME framework, which decomposes supportive empathy into Emotional Reactions, Interpretations, and Explorations, we study three instruction-tuned LLMs and ask whether candidate directions derived from these labels produce distinguishable intervention effects or instead share structure, and how persona prompts interact with those directions. We find th

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