Activation Steering Induces Emergent Misalignment: Steering Vector Construction and Comprehensive Evaluation
Activation steering (AS) has emerged as a popular inference-time technique for modulating the behavior of large language models (LLMs). AS modulates model behavior in a flexible and lightweight manner by injecting task-specific steering vectors (SVs) into intermediate activations. Meanwhile, recent work has identified emergent misalignment (EM) as an emerging safety concern, whereby finetuning on unsafe examples from a narrow task unexpectedly induces broadly unsafe behavior in unrelated domains. With the increasing popularity of AS, it is pressing yet under-explored to thoroughly investigate whether AS can induce EM. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive study of activation-steering-...
| Authors | Qi Cao, Jian Lou, Meiting Liu et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 7 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 14 October 2026 |
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