Attribute-Based Activation Steering of LLMs for Group-Specific Explanation Generation
To effectively enable people to understand new topics, explanations should be tailored to their backgrounds and abilities. Prompting alone has been shown to be insufficient for creating such explanations, and other computational methods are missing so far. Therefore, this paper investigates whether LLMs can be steered to generate explanations that are tailored to a specific group of people. To this end, we propose an approach that first identifies group-specific attributes in terms of explanatory style and knowledge of a specific target group. Building on activation engineering, it then computes attribute-based steering vectors and adds them to the internal activations of an LLM during in...
| Authors | Leandra Fichtel, Janek Prange, Henning Wachsmuth |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 29 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 1 September 2026 |
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