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Painless Activation Steering: An Automated, Lightweight Approach for Post-Training Large Language Models

Created by
  • Haebom

Author

Sasha Cui, Zhongren Chen

Outline

This paper introduces Painless Activation Steering (PAS), an automated activation steering (AS) method for post-training language models (LMs). Unlike existing AS techniques, PAS utilizes labeled datasets, making AS easy to use without manual prompt construction, feature labeling, or human intervention. Evaluations on the Llama3.1-8B-Instruct, DeepSeek-R1-Distill-8B, and Nous-Hermes-2 models and 18 tasks revealed that PAS improved performance on action-related tasks, with the iPAS variant demonstrating the strongest causal steering effect. Furthermore, PAS offers additional advantages over In-Context Learning (ICL) and Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT).

Takeaways, Limitations

PAS is an automated AS technique that provides a practical way to tune the behavior of language models without manual intervention.
PAS can be combined with In-Context Learning and Supervised Fine-Tuning to achieve performance improvements.
IPAS has shown powerful effects in regulating specific behaviors.
PAS is effective for behavior-related tasks, but has limited effectiveness for intelligence-related tasks.
The effectiveness of PAS may vary depending on the model and task.
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