Empathy Is Steerable but Multi-Axial: Mechanism Geometry and Persona Effects in LLMs
Activation steering has been used to control traits such as honesty, refusal, and sycophancy, yet supportive empathy is evaluated along multiple dimensions that need not correspond to independently controllable activation directions. Using the EPITOME framework, which decomposes supportive empathy into Emotional Reactions, Interpretations, and Explorations, we study three instruction-tuned LLMs and ask whether candidate directions derived from these labels produce distinguishable intervention effects or instead share structure, and how persona prompts interact with those directions. We find that contrastive activation addition yields a stable middle-layer intervention that consistently sh...
| Authors | JuHeon Ha, Byounghan Lee, Yunseo Choi et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 14 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 14 September 2026 |
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