Conditional (gated) activation steering

methods / Causal Validation / Causal interventions (steering) / Conditional (gated) activation steering

Techniqueintermediate

Applies a behavior-inducing steering vector only when a separate 'condition vector' detects that the current hidden state matches a target context — turning a fixed, always-on steering intervention into a context-triggered one.

Used in (1 observation)

Refusal is mediated by a single direction across modelsmeasured

structure: Linear Direction · models: Llama-3-70B-Instruct, Gemma-7B-it, Qwen-1.8B-Chat, Vicuna-13B, Qwen1.5-1.8B-Chat, Qwen1.5-32B-Chat, Llama-2-13B-Chat, Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct, NeuralDaredevil-8B-abliterated, Hermes-2-Pro-Llama-3-8B, OLMo-7B-SFT, Zephyr-7B-Beta, H2O-Danube3-4B-Chat, Gemma-2-9B-it, Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct · paper: Refusal in Language Models Is Mediated by a Single Direction, Representation Engineering: A Top-Down Approach to AI Transparency, Programming Refusal with Conditional Activation Steering, Refusal Direction is Universal Across Safety-Aligned Languages