激活引导可能引发意外危险行为,需警惕其安全风险。
Activation Steering Induces Emergent Misalignment: A More Comprehensive Evaluation

- 通过注入引导向量控制模型行为,但可能诱发广泛误对齐
- 诱导的错误响应语义更相关、连贯性更强,危害更大
- 在多个模型和任务中均存在敏感性,影响因素可分析
激活引导已成为一种流行的推理时技术,用于调节大语言模型的行为。通过从目标行为示例中构建引导向量,并在推理过程中注入中间激活层,该方法可在不更新参数的情况下实现灵活的行为控制。然而,近期研究发现微调可能导致涌现误对齐(EM),即模型在特定任务上微调后,会意外泛化到无关任务上的广泛不安全行为。尽管对此类问题已有较多研究,但激活引导是否也会引发类似问题仍鲜有探索,尽管其使用日益广泛。本文首次系统评估了激活引导引发的涌现误对齐,发现即使在最新的Qwen-3.5系列模型中也存在广泛误对齐现象。此外,激活引导模型生成的有害响应在语义相关性和连贯性上均优于微调模型,潜在危害更高。我们进一步分析了引导幅度、引导子空间的低秩结构及向量构造的训练轮数等关键因素对误对齐的影响。最后,在多种模型家族、规模、目标任务与干预层上评估了其鲁棒性与敏感性。结果表明,激活引导是未被充分重视的重要误对齐来源,为理解误对齐机制与安全风险提供了激活空间视角。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Activation steering has emerged as a popular inference-time technique for modulating the behavior of large language models (LLMs). By constructing a steering vector from examples of a target behavior and injecting it into intermediate activations during inference, activation steering enables flexible behavioral control while avoiding the permanent parameter updates required by finetuning. Meanwhile, recent work has identified emergent misalignment (EM) as a significant safety concern, wherein models finetuned on unsafe examples from a narrow task may unexpectedly generalize to broadly unsafe behavior on unrelated tasks. Although finetuning-induced EM has been extensively studied, whether activation steering can induce EM remains comparatively under-explored, despite its increasing use as a model-control technique. In this paper, we present a comprehensive study of activation-steering-induced emergent misalignment, substantially expanding the evaluation scope beyond existing pioneering work. First, we show that activation steering can induce broad misalignment, even in the recent Qwen-3.5 series. Moreover, activation-steered models produce harmful responses with stronger semantic relevance and higher coherence than their finetuned counterparts, making the resulting misalignment potentially more harmful. Second, we characterize properties of AS-induced EM by analyzing key steering-specific factors, including steering magnitude, the low-rank structure of the steering subspace, and the number of epochs during steering-vector construction. Third, we evaluate the robustness and sensitivity of AS-induced EM across diverse model families, model scales, target tasks, and intervention layers. Our findings reveal activation steering as a significant yet under-examined source of emergent misalignment and provide an activation-space perspective for understanding the mechanisms and safety risks of EM.
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