When Does Activation Steering Change What a Model Computes From?
Activation steering can reliably change an agent's output by modifying its internal activations. Yet arriving at the same answer need not involve the same computation: behavioral equivalence does not imply mechanistic equivalence. We test whether an activation edit changes the state used in subsequent computation or biases that computation toward the desired output. In a controlled state-tracking task, trace supervision creates an editable register: changing its internal value makes the model apply the next operation to the edited state. We next ask whether widely used mean activation steering admits a similar interpretation: does steering recreate the internal configuration the model nat...
| Authors | Benjamin Shih, John Winnicki, Eric Darve |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 28 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 6 September 2026 |
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