Genesis Steering: Better Activation Steering Through Training Data

Abstract

Activation steering controls large language models at inference time, but its effectiveness depends on the choice of reference data. We introduce genesis steering, which derives a genesis vector from contrastive examples in the model's own fine-tuning data. When these data are unavailable, we draw on the membership inference literature to identify likely training examples and construct a proxy dataset. We establish two theoretical results on optimal displacement to the decision boundary and reduced proxy-estimation bias. We evaluate genesis steering and membership-based proxy construction on T\"ulu-3-8B, whose fine-tuning data are publicly available, and Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct as a control. We find that safety data from T\"ulu-3-8B's training mixture yield stronger steering than external datasets on both models. On T\"ulu-3-8B, membership scores largely agree in identifying training examples, and vectors built from top-ranked examples achieve competitive performance against random subsets of the same size. In contrast, the results on Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct hint that a MIA method will only have a positive effect if the mean direction shift with MIA-filtered in-distribution data is much less severe than the direction shift with OoD data.