SteerCheck: Attribution Specificity and Alignment Leakage in Activation-Steering Audits
Activation steering can change behaviour without establishing that the effect is specific to the intended concept. We introduce SteerCheck, a preregistered attribution audit that matches off-target KL and separates mean, protected-tail, polarity, transfer, and semantic claims. Exact replay of 960 Qwen3-14B interventions reveals complementary limits of common controls: isotropic directions occupy a narrow near-orthogonal region, whereas sign-randomized same-construction directions often retain substantial target alignment. Effect is strongly associated with signed cosine within the sign-randomized family ($ρ=.94$); $25.3\%$ of its draws exceed cosine $.5$, and every draw exceeding the obse...
| Authors | Daming Luo, Christy Liang, Junyu Xuan |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 25 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 25 August 2026 |
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