Can We Break LLMs Out of Self-Loops? Fine-Grained Reasoning Control with Activation Steering
Extended reasoning has become standard for frontier Large Language Models (LLMs), yet the trajectories these models produce remain largely uncontrollable. Existing methods for shaping how a model reasons are prompt based approaches and operate at the input level, offering no fine-grained control over the reasoning process itself. Related work analyzes and discovers latent transition dynamics in the reasoning traces from Large Language Models. Building on this, we statistically characterize these states, and show that failure trajectories get stuck in self-loops, exhausting the token budget without progress toward the final answer. To intervene on these failures, We propose SOPHIA: Steerin...
| Authors | Sheldon Yu, Tong Yu, Xunyi Jiang et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 20 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 20 July 2026 |
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