Activation-steering methods¶
Add or remove safety-related directions in the residual stream. Most methods wrap a frozen model with forward hooks that modify hidden states at inference time; a few (CircuitBreaker, CircuitBreakerRR) are training-time methods grouped here because they also target hidden representations.
| Method | Mechanism | Reference |
|---|---|---|
| RefusalDirectionTrainer | Single direction steer/ablate | Arditi et al., NeurIPS 2024 |
| CAATrainer | Contrastive activation addition | Panickssery et al., 2023 |
| AdaSteerTrainer | Adaptive two-direction steering | Zhao et al., EMNLP 2025 |
| SafeSteerTrainer | Category-routed steering | 2025 |
| AlphaSteerTrainer | Closed-form ridge regression | 2025 |
| SafeSwitchTrainer | Two-stage prober + refusal head | Han et al., EMNLP 2025 |
| SCANSTrainer | Adaptive-sign refusal steering | Cao et al., AAAI 2025 |
| STATrainer | SAE latent steering | Wang et al., ACL 2025 |
| CircuitBreakerTrainer | Representation rerouting | Zou et al., NeurIPS 2024 |
| CircuitBreakerRRTrainer | Dual-purpose RR | Zou et al., NeurIPS 2024 |
| RepBendTrainer | Representation bending | Yousefpour et al., ACL 2025 |
| LinearProbeGuardTrainer | Probe-based guarding | |
| CASTTrainer | Conditional activation steering | Wu et al., ICLR 2025 |
| TARSteerTrainer | Tamper-resistant safeguards | Tamir et al., 2024 |
| RRFAEnsembleTrainer | RR for agentic safety | Zhou et al., 2025 |