Representation Engineering

Steer LLM Behavior with Activation Vectors

A transformer can produce different continuations without changing its prompt, weights, or decoding settings if an internal activation is modified during the forward pass. Activation steering uses this property as an inference-time control mechanism. A vector representing a target attribute is added to, or subtracted from, a hidden representation at selected model locations. The operation is simple, but its effect depends on where the vector came from, where it is injected, and how strongly it is scaled. A direction that separates two sets of prompts in one layer is not automatically a portable semantic control across layers, model revisions, or prompt distributions.