Steer Like the LLM: Activation Steering that Mimics Prompting
Large language models can be steered at inference time through prompting or activation interventions, but activation steering methods often underperform compared to prompt-based approaches. We propose a framework that formulates prompt steering as a form of activation steering and investigates whether distilling successful prompt steering behavior into simpler, interpretable models can close this gap. Our analysis reveals that popular activation steering methods are not faithful to the mechanics of prompt steering, which applies strong interventions on some tokens while barely affecting others. Based on these insights, we introduce Prompt Steering Replacement (PSR) models that estimate to...
| Authors | Geert Heyman, Frederik Vandeputte |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 5 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 5 May 2026 |
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