Activation Steering for Aligned Open-ended Generation without Sacrificing Coherence
Alignment in LLMs is more brittle than commonly assumed: misalignment can be induced by adversarial prompts, benign fine-tuning, emergent misalignment, and goal misgeneralization. Recent evidence suggests that some misalignment behaviors are encoded as linear structure in activation space, making it tractable via activation steering, which could be used as a lightweight runtime defense. We implement three methods: Steer-With-Fixed-Coefficient (SwFC), which applies uniform additive steering, and two novel projection-aware methods, Steer-to-Target-Projection (StTP) and Steer-to-Mirror-Projection (StMP), that use a logistic regression decision boundary to selectively intervene only on tokens...
| Authors | Niklas Herbster, Martin Zborowski, Alberto Tosato et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 9 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 23 August 2026 |
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