End-to-end Learning of Sparse Interventions on Activations to Steer Generation (2503.10679v2)

Abstract: The growing use of generative models in daily life calls for efficient mechanisms to control their generation, to e.g., produce safe content or provide users with tools to explore style changes. Ideally, such mechanisms should be cheap, both at train and inference time, while preserving output quality. Recent research has shown that such mechanisms can be obtained by intervening exclusively on model activations, with the goal of correcting distributional differences between activations seen when using prompts from a source vs. a target set (e.g., toxic and non-toxic sentences). While cheap, these fast methods are inherently crude: their maps are tuned locally, not accounting for their impact on downstream layers, resulting in interventions that cause unintended shifts when used out-of-sample. We propose in this work linear end-to-end activation steering (LinEAS), an approach trained with a global loss that accounts simultaneously for all layerwise distributional shifts. In addition to being more robust, the loss used to train LinEAS can be regularized with sparsifying norms, which can automatically carry out neuron and layer selection. Empirically, LinEAS only requires a handful of samples to be effective, and beats similar baselines on toxicity mitigation, while performing on par with far more involved finetuning approaches. We show that LinEAS interventions can be composed, study the impact of sparsity on their performance, and showcase applications in text-to-image diffusions.