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 over intervention layer and coefficient. They introduce concept granularity to measure directional heterogeneity and present GRACE, a framework using activation geometry to diagnose steering difficulties and reduce required evaluations by 39.8% on average.

Summary generated by Claude — human-verified