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arXiv · 2610.04283

First-Order Steering: Translating Weight Adaptation into Activation Steering

Sri Pranav Kunda·Alexander Kurz·Tomas Dominik·Uri Maoz
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Abstract

Activation steering exploits interpretable directions in the residual stream to enable inference-time manipulation of model behavior. Composing steering vectors to apply multiple target behaviors simultaneously is important in various fields-including AI alignment and safety-but remains a challenge for existing activation steering methods. In contrast, prior work in model merging shows that target behaviors represented by learned weight adaptations can be combined with high accuracy. A method that translates weight adaptations into activation steering vectors could therefore extend prior work in model merging to generate composable steering vectors that better enable simultaneous inference-time behavioral control. For this, we introduce First-Order Steering, a formulation of activation steering as a first-order approximation of weight update matrices parameterized by a vector of steering strengths, and establish theoretical bounds on the approximation error of first-order steering. We then develop a novel model merging procedure, HeRD-Merging, which minimizes the first-order approximation error terms to enable higher first-order steering accuracy. Together, our method produces steering vectors that control both individual and composed behaviors more accurately than existing activation steering methods. Furthermore, HeRD-Merging matches the performance of conventional model-merging baselines, while producing weight adaptations that admit more accurate first-order steering vectors.

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BibTeXRIS

Sri Pranav Kunda, Alexander Kurz, Tomas Dominik, Uri Maoz. 2026-10-03. First-Order Steering: Translating Weight Adaptation into Activation Steering. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.04283

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