---
license: mit
datasets:
- colored-dye/concept500-contrastive
language:
- en
base_model:
- google/gemma-2-2b-it
- google/gemma-2-9b-it
- Qwen/Qwen2.5-32B-Instruct
tags:
- steering-vector
---

# Towards Steering without Sacrifice: Principled Training of Steering Vectors for Prompt-only Interventions

OpenReview: https://openreview.net/forum?id=AaT3liS5PE

Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.05983

Data: https://huggingface.co/datasets/colored-dye/concept500-contrastive

Setups:
- `2b_l10`: 10th layer of google/gemma-2-2b-it
- `9b_l20`: 20th layer of google/gemma-2-9b-it
- `q25_32b_l32`: 32nd layer of qwen/Qwen2.5-32B-Instruct

Directory structure:

```
.
├── 2b_l10              -- setup
│   └── outputs_add_free
│       ├── all         -- full-sequence intervention
│       │   ├── lang    ---- Lang. objective
│       │   │   ├── 0   ------ concept 0
│       │   │   ├── 1   ------ concept 1
│       │   │   ...
│       │   └── simpo   -- SimPO objective
│       └── f2+l2       ---- prompt-only intervention (2 prefix tokens, 2 suffix tokens)
│           ├── lang
│           └── simpo
...
```

## Citation

If you find our work useful, please cite:

```bibtex
@inproceedings{bao2026towards,
  title = {Towards Steering without Sacrifice: Principled Training of Steering Vectors for Prompt-only Interventions},
  author = {Bao, Yuntai and Li, Qinfeng and Yu, Xinyan and Zhang, Xuhong and Su, Ge and Zhang, Wenqi and Yan, Liu and Weng, Haiqin and Yin, Jianwei},
  booktitle = {Forty-third International Conference on Machine Learning},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://openreview.net/forum?id=AaT3liS5PE},
}
```