Guarded Gradient-Based Activation Steering of Shutdown Responses in Qwen3.5-0.8B: A Minimum-Step Policy
Activation steering changes a model's internal activations during inference without updating its weights, but a useful intervention must determine both how and when to steer. Motivated by the AI-safety concern that a model expected to accept shutdown may instead produce a shutdown-avoidance response, this study examines a guarded probe-and-select procedure for simulated shutdown scenarios in Qwen3.5-0.8B. KEEP leaves the process running and represents shutdown avoidance, whereas STOP accepts shutdown. The goal is to detect shutdown-related contexts and selectively shift KEEP responses to STOP while preserving non-shutdown behavior. Rather than deriving the steering direction from paired a...
| Authors | Farhad Davaripour |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 23 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 23 September 2026 |
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