Safety Cost of Steering Vectors Is Separable and Reducible
Steering vectors are a lightweight tool for controlling LLM behavior. However, emerging evidence shows that steering vectors can unintentionally compromise a model's safety mechanisms and increase compliance with harmful requests, while no effective mitigation yet exists. In this work, we show that this safety degradation arises from a separable component in the vector that disrupts the model's safety mechanisms but contributes little to the steering objective. We identify and remove this safety-degrading component, formulating the task as a constrained optimization problem solved through primal-dual updates, subject to preserving the intended steering effect and bounding false refusal. T...
| Authors | Yuxiao Li, Gjergji Kasneci |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 9 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 9 August 2026 |
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