Guarded Gradient-Based Activation Steering of Shutdown Responses in Qwen3.5-0.8B: A Minimum-Step Policy

תקציר מקורי באנגליתarXiv:2609.30326v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Activation steering changes a model's internal activations during inference without updating its weights, but a useful intervention must determine both how and when to steer. Motivated by the AI-safety concern that a model expected to accept shutdown may instead produce a shutdown-avoidance response, this study examines a guarded probe-and-select procedure for simulated shutdown scenarios in Qwen3.5-0.8B. KEEP leaves the process running and represents shutdown avoidance, whereas STOP accepts shutdown. The goal is to detect shutdown-related contexts and selectively shift KEEP responses to STOP while preserving non-shutdown behavior. Rather than deriving the steering direction from paired activation differences, the method derives it directly f