Genesis-Based Selection for Directly Optimized Steering Vectors

Determine whether genesis-based selection benefits activation-steering methods that directly optimize steering vectors, beyond difference-of-means steering.

Background

The paper evaluates genesis steering only through difference-of-means vectors. It notes that other activation-steering approaches optimize steering vectors directly, and leaves unresolved whether selecting examples from a model’s own fine-tuning data provides a comparable benefit for those methods.

References

Whether genesis-based selection benefits methods that optimize steering vectors directly \citep{cao_personalized_2024,wu_reft_2024} remains open.

— Genesis Steering: Better Activation Steering Through Training Data  (2610.19114 - Bodin et al., 13 Oct 2026) in Section Limitations