Narmeen developed, ideated and validated K-steering at Martian. Luke generated the baselines, figures and wrote this blog post. Amir proposed the research direction and supervised the project. The full interactive blog will be available closer to the publication of the complete paper on the Martian website.

TL;DR: We introduce K-steering, a steering method for language models that allows for steering in multiple simultaneous directions. Our preliminary results show it outperforms a contrastive activation addition (CAA) baseline.

Introduction

We introduce K-Steering, a method for steering language models in multiple directions simultaneously by perturbing activations according to the logits of a multilabel classifier. We experiment with steering conversational tone, showing that K-steering can cause a classifier to give high probabilities to multiple labels/tones. Qualitatively, we find that models steered with a K-steering vector respond in multiple simultaneous tones well.

Current steering methods such as ActAdd and CAA are designed to elicit a single behavior based on contrastive pairs of inputs. Unsupervised steering methods such as deep causal transcoding allow for learning many steering vectors, some of which may elicit multiple behaviors. However, there has been limited work on methods for learning steering vectors that elicit multiple specified behaviors, which K-Steering achieves. Although we experiment only with conversational tone, we expect K-steering to work for most tasks for which an accurate classifier can be trained.

A visualization of the K-steering method. For an activation vector $A$ , we calculate a steering loss that penalizes higher logits from a classifier on $A$ for undesired labels and rewards higher logits for desired labels. By backpropagating this loss through the classifier, we obtain the steered activations $A^{'} = A - α Δ L$ .

As an example, we give the following steered and unsteered generations to the prompt "What is the structure of the human heart?":

Llama-3.2-3B-Instruct Unsteered

Llama-3.2-3B-Instruct K-Steered
(toward a casual and concise tone, and away from an expert tone)

Step 1: Identify the main components of the human heart

The human heart is a muscular organ that pumps blood throughout the body. It is divided into four main chambers: the left and right atria, and the left and right ventricles.

St

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