When Is Rank-1 Steering Cheap? Geometry, Granularity, and Budgeted Search

In three linesResearchers formalize activation steering (LLM control without retraining) as budget-constrained optimization. They introduce "concept granularity" to explain why some concepts are expensive to steer, and propose GRACE, a framework using activation geometry to diagnose difficulties and reduce evaluations needed by 39.8% on average.

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