Sweep Less, Steer More: Using Activation Steering Geometry for Reduced Hyperparameter Search
Nishkal Hundia, Swastik Agrawal, Navita Goyal, Sarah Wiegreffe
Abstract
Representation steering methods like difference-in-means (DIM) offer a lightweight approach to controlling LLM behavior, but their effectiveness varies widely across concepts, datasets, and layers, making principled deployment costly without exhaustive hyperparameter sweeps. We build on the discriminability index $d'$, a compute-cheap geometric measure of how well contrastive training activations separate along the steering direction. Across five behaviors on 3 models, we demonstrate uses beyond its established role as a dataset-level steerability predictor. First, in the multiple-choice question answering (MCQA) setting, we show that $d'$ reliably identifies performant layers at which to steer, eliminating the need for a layer-wise sweep. Second, we extend this analysis to open-ended multi-token generation, and find that $d'$ remains successful for layer selection across different settings. Lastly, we test whether the position of a generated token's representation on the DIM line predicts steering success on that individual example. In the MCQA setting, this works for high-$d'$ datasets but is inconsistent across behaviors, models, and training-token choices in open-ended generation. This highlights that methods developed and conclusions drawn in single-token MCQA settings do not necessarily transfer to open-ended generation.