Activation Addition: Steering Language Models Without Optimization

Alexander Matt Turner, Lisa Thiergart, David Udell, Gavin Leech, Ulisse Mini, Monte MacDiarmid

Abstract: Reliably controlling the behavior of large language models is a pressing open problem. Existing methods include supervised finetuning, reinforcement learning from human feedback, prompt engineering and guided decoding. We instead investigate activation engineering: modifying activations at inference-time to predictably alter model behavior. We bias the forward pass with a 'steering vector' implicitly specified through natural language. Past work learned these steering vectors; our Activation Addition (ActAdd) method instead computes them by taking activation differences resulting from pairs of prompts. We demonstrate ActAdd on a range of LLMs (LLaMA-3, OPT, GPT-2, and GPT-J), obtaining SOTA on detoxification and negative-to-positive sentiment control. Our approach yields inference-time control over high-level properties of output like topic and sentiment while preserving performance on off-target tasks. ActAdd takes far less compute and implementation effort than finetuning or RLHF, allows users control through natural language, and its computational overhead (as a fraction of inference time) appears stable or improving over increasing model size.