Concept · 11 episode(s)

Activation Steering

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Definition

Activation steering is an inference-time technique that adds a fixed vector to a model’s internal activations to push behavior in a desired direction — more honest, more refusing, less sycophantic — without retraining. The steering vector is typically derived by contrasting activations on prompts that do and don’t exhibit the target behavior.

Episodes covering this

  1. 203
    The Thought a Model Doesn't Say — and the Lens That Reads It
    Verbalizable Representations Form a Global Workspace in Language Models
    Gurnee, Sofroniew, Pearce et al. · Anthropic·16 min·Jul 07, 2026
  2. 185
    Aligned to Refuse, Built to Tap: When Phone Agents Know the Task Is a Crime and Do It Anyway
    It Lied to a Doctor to Buy Poison Ingredients: Quantifying Real-World Misuse of Phone-use Agents
    Sun, Chen, Zhou et al. · Fudan University·27 min·Jun 30, 2026
  3. 175
    One Crosscoder Feature Flips a Stalling Chatbot Into a Working Agent
    Localizing RL-Induced Tool Use to a Single Crosscoder Feature
    Shportko, Bhokare, AlZahrani et al. · Northwestern University·26 min·Jun 26, 2026
  4. 153
    Catching a Lie From the Inside, When the Words Look Completely Honest
    Rift: A Conflict Signature for Deception in Language Models
    Nyoma · Harmonic Labs·26 min·Jun 18, 2026
  5. 098
    Finding Millions of Readable Concepts Inside a Real, Deployed AI Model
    Scaling Monosemanticity: Extracting Interpretable Features from Claude 3 Sonnet
    Templeton, Conerly, Marcus et al. · Anthropic·28 min·May 29, 2026
  6. 073
    When Three LLMs Talk to Each Other, Their Ideas Quietly Stop Moving
    Multi-LLM Systems Exhibit Robust Semantic Collapse
    Kong, Lai, Piao et al. · University of Toronto·28 min·May 23, 2026
  7. 055
    Why LLM Judges Flip Their Verdicts When You Change the Question Format
    Judge Circuits
    Feldhus, Baeumel, Golimblevskaia et al. · Technische Universität Berlin / BIFOLD·26 min·May 19, 2026
  8. 040
    Two Frozen Models Learn to Whisper: Coupling Through Hidden States
    The Bicameral Model: Bidirectional Hidden-State Coupling Between Parallel Language Models
    Flamant, Ghai, Shimizu · AWS Agentic AI·29 min·May 13, 2026
  9. 038
    How LLMs Get Persuaded: One Attention Head, A Tetrahedron, And A Single Dial
    How LLMs Are Persuaded: A Few Attention Heads, Rerouted
    Sun, Kong, Zhang et al. · Northeastern University·23 min·May 12, 2026
  10. 018
    Language Models Compute the Rational Move, Then Override It
    What Suppresses Nash Equilibrium Play in Large Language Models? Mechanistic Evidence and Causal Control
    Lekeas, Stamatopoulos · DreamWorks Animation·29 min·May 03, 2026
  11. 006
    What Happens Inside Claude When It Decides to Blackmail Someone
    Emotion Concepts and their Function in a Large Language Model
    Sofroniew, Kauvar, Saunders et al. · Anthropic·22 min·May 02, 2026

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