Toward Latent Language Model Skills Steering and Optimization: An Empirical Study
Skills, as a useful abstraction for the procedural capabilities of large language models (LLMs), capture how models perform structured, multi-step reasoning and program execution. Existing approaches typically treat skills as explicit, surface-level constructs specified through prompts or programs, leaving open the question of how such procedural capabilities are represented inside the model and whether they can be manipulated as structured objects in latent space. In this empirical study, we investigate whether procedural LLM skills can be represented as directions in activation space and whether vector-space operations over these directions can express skill-level behaviors. We find tha...
| Authors | Xunyi Jiang, Junda Wu, Yuxin Xiong et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 29 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 29 August 2026 |
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 17 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.