Activation Flow: Manufacturing Activations for Steering
Difference-in-means steering requires activations recorded while a model shows the desired behavior, which a sandbagging model withholds by deliberately underperforming. We introduce Activation Flow (ActFlow), which manufactures these activations from $k$ correct labels without fine-tuning. ActFlow sets target logits that rank each labeled item's correct answer first, and moves the logits toward them by adding one vector $x$ to all $k$ residual streams at one layer. ActFlow is a family of ordinary differential equations for $x$, one for each rule that maps the required logit change to the velocity of $x$. The smallest-norm rule lands exactly on the targets, while the others keep only the ...
| Authors | Hong Kiat Tan, Linh Le, David Williams-King |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 26 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 2 October 2026 |
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