Steering Vectors are an Adversarial Attack Surface
Activation steering has become a popular way to control Large Language Model (LLM) behavior without fine-tuning. Since the technique is plug-and-play, users share datasets and precomputed vectors to steer model activations. However, we show that a \emph{stealth data poisoning attack} silently compromises this pipeline. By substituting $4{-}6\%$ of tokens in the steering dataset, an attacker can silently align the resulting vector with an anti-refusal direction. This jailbreaks the target model while preserving the intended steering effect on benign prompts. Under this threat model, a malicious actor can distribute an apparently safe bundle containing texts, vectors, and weights, alongside...
| Authors | Abzal Aidakhmetov, Donato Crisostomi, Tommaso Mencattini et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 4 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 4 June 2026 |
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