Forecasting Side Effects of Activation Steering

arXiv cs.AIAugust 13, 2026en

arXiv cs.AI

AI Global Wire

arXiv:2608.11227v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Activation steering modifies a language model by adding a learned direction to its hidden activations, enabling targeted behavioral changes without retraining. While effective, steering often produces unintended side effects on other behaviors, making it difficult to deploy safely. We therefore ask: can these side effects be forecasted before steering is applied? We answer this question by constructing a cross-effect matrix over a taxonomy of 67 behaviors across three open-weight language models. We find that side effects are common, structured, and often asymmetric, revealing interactions that cannot be explained by existing similarity-based h

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