Conceptor steering (soft projection)

methods / Causal Validation / Causal interventions (steering) / Conceptor steering (soft projection)

Techniqueadvanced

Steers activations by soft-projecting them through a conceptor matrix (h ↦ β·C·h) rather than adding a fixed steering vector — a matrix-vector operation that scales each direction by its graded relevance instead of translating uniformly.

Used in (3 observations)

Bipolar conceptors beat additive steering and compose via Boolean opsmeasured

structure: Conceptor (soft ellipsoidal region) · models: Gemma-2-2B-it, Gemma-2-9B-it, Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct · paper: Conceptors for Semantic Steering

Task representations are soft ellipsoidal regions, not single vectorsmeasured

structure: Conceptor (soft ellipsoidal region) · models: GPT-J-6B, GPT-NeoX-20B · paper: Steering Large Language Models using Conceptors: Improving Addition-Based Activation Engineering

Conceptor ellipsoids store and recall many attractors in one reservoirmeasured

structure: Conceptor (soft ellipsoidal region) · models: Reservoir/echo-state network (N=100 neurons, Jaeger 2014) · paper: Controlling Recurrent Neural Networks by Conceptors