- AI, But Simple
- Posts
- A Simple Guide to LLM Activation Steering With Control Systems
A Simple Guide to LLM Activation Steering With Control Systems
AI, But Simple Issue #114
Edwin Dong
August 10, 2026
A Simple Guide to LLM Activation Steering With Control Systems
AI, But Simple Issue #113
It’s known that even the most aligned LLMs can sometimes say dishonest, offensive, or unsafe things.
The usual fix for this in AI development is fine-tuning, but this method is slow, needs a lot of data, and can unintentionally degrade model skills that were never meant to be touched.
Which is why researchers lean on a lighter-weight trick called activation steering, where you nudge hidden activations mid-generation toward a desired behavior instead of retraining.
The problem is that most steering methods are basically a guess and a shove because you compute a direction offline, add it at every layer and hope that it survives the trip through the rest of the layers.
A team from Georgia Tech (Skifstad et al., 2026) asked an interesting question: if the LLM already evolves activation by activation, why not steer it the way engineers steer rockets, drones, and thermostats?