Steering Language Model Goals with Value Transplant
Reasoning models often act as if they pursue goals, but their efforts are not always directed toward what users intend, sometimes leading them to pursue unintended outcomes. Previous work has examined how models may internally track their progress toward their goals through a "value axis." We study whether changing such a signal can retarget the model's search toward a different goal. We test value transplant: at each token, we shift the host model's activation along a candidate value axis by the donor-host difference in value coordinates (multiplied by a large scalar), aiming to redirect the host toward the donor's goal. We study this intervention in Qwen3-8B and GPT-OSS-20B models fine-...
| Authors | Pengcheng Jiang, Fabien Roger |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 28 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 28 September 2026 |
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