MATH · IN · MODELS

Bipolar conceptors beat additive steering and compose via Boolean ops

measured in 1 paper

- A "bipolar" conceptor C = R(R+alpha^-2 I)^-1, fit by pooling activations from both poles of a concept, captures >=95% of the mean-difference steering direction versus ~10% for a single pole. [triantafyllopoulos-etal-2026-bipolar-conceptors] - Soft-projection steering through the bipolar conceptor beats additive and diff-of-means steering (Gemma-2-2B-IT win ratios 0.70-0.82 vs baselines' 0.50-0.62) and yields far fewer degenerate outputs (13% vs 30% diff-of-means, 58% additive). [triantafyllopoulos-etal-2026-bipolar-conceptors] - Two concept conceptors compose via closed-form Boolean AND/OR/NOT (AND = (C_A^-1 + C_B^-1 - I)^-1) from the matrices alone, causally shifting multi-concept behavior in the predicted direction (e.g. Abortion AND LGBTQ raises "Both" 0.29 to 0.34). [triantafyllopoulos-etal-2026-bipolar-conceptors] - Tested on Gemma-2-2B-IT, Gemma-2-9B-IT and Qwen-2.5-3B-Instruct; inference-time steering evaluated by classifier win-ratios (authors disclaim clinical/persuasion use). [triantafyllopoulos-etal-2026-bipolar-conceptors]

Context

bipolar conceptor (pooling both poles of a concept), win-ratio behavioral evaluation, degenerate-output rate, Boolean AND/OR/NOT composition of conceptors

Papers

Conceptors for Semantic Steering — Triantafyllopoulos, Ilias, Cho, Young-Min, Tao, Ren, Miao, Miranda Muqing, Rai, Sunny, Ungar, Lyle, Guntuku, Sharath Chandra, Ryant, Neville, Sedoc, João2026 · arXiv:2605.04980