What Survives When Activation Steering Is Used as Memory
Activation steering has recently been used as a memory for skills: past experiences of an agent are stored as steering vectors and retrieved later. Facts and preferences about the user are assumed to need text instead. We test that assumption with a training-free activation memory beside a frozen LLM. The change an experience causes in late-layer states is stored as a shift, filed under a whitened key for the conversation's gist, and added back in a later session only when the gist matches. We argue that such a shift is a fixed average of an effect that attention, in context, recomputes for every question, so only question-independent content can survive. In a pre-registered study on Qwen...
| Authors | Vedant Jumle |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 10 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 10 October 2026 |
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