Valence-Arousal Subspace in LLMs: Circular Emotion Geometry and Multi-Behavioral Control
We show that emotion vectors in LLMs are organized by a two-dimensional valence-arousal (VA) subspace exhibiting circular geometry. Through principal component decomposition and ridge regression, we recover meaningful VA axes underlying emotion steering vectors whose projections correlate with human affect ratings across 44,728 words. Steering along these axes produces monotonic control over the affective properties of generated text, and further affords bidirectional control over multiple downstream behaviors (refusal and sycophancy) from a single subspace. These effects replicate across Llama-3.1-8B, Qwen3-8B, and Qwen3-14B. We propose lexical mediation to explain why these effects and ...
| Authors | Lihao Sun, Lewen Yan, Xiaoya Lu et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 3 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 8 May 2026 |
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