Probabilistic Concept-Aware Steering for Trustworthy LLM Inference

Brian Becker; Rui Chu; Yingjie Lao

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arXiv · 2607.18259

Probabilistic Concept-Aware Steering for Trustworthy LLM Inference

Brian Becker·Rui Chu·Yingjie Lao

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Abstract

Steering vectors (SVs), an inference-time intervention technique for large language models (LLMs), guide the generation process by adding a concept-specific direction vector to intermediate activations during inference. However, existing SV methods frequently yield representation-incoherent behaviors that undermine interpretability and fine-grained control, largely because prior work has focused on binary positive-negative steering evaluation while employing discrete clustering metrics that fail to capture the continuous spectrum of semantic alignment. In this work, we present the Probabilistic Concept-Aware Steering (PCS) framework for LLM inference. PCS preserves original task competence while providing controllable, safety-oriented semantic bias through concept-driven steering-vector retrieval and probabilistic strength calibration.

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Brian Becker, Rui Chu, Yingjie Lao. 2026-05-15. Probabilistic Concept-Aware Steering for Trustworthy LLM Inference. https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.18259

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