arXiv:2603.18329v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Inference-time steering is widely regarded as a lightweight and parameter-free mechanism for controlling large language model (LLM) behavior, and prior work has often suggested that simple activation-level interventions can reliably induce targeted behavioral changes. However, such conclusions are typically drawn under relatively relaxed evaluation settings that overlook deployment constraints, capability trade-offs, and real-world robustness. We therefore introduce textbfFaithSteer-BENCH, a stress-testing benchmark that evaluates steering methods at a fixed deployment-style operating point through three gate-wise criteria: controllability, utility preservation, and robustness. Across multiple models and representative steering approaches, we uncover several systematic failure modes that are largely obscured under standard evaluation, including illusory controllability, measurable cognitive tax on unrelated capabilities, and substantial brittleness under mild instruction-level perturbations, role prompts, encoding transformations, and data scarcity. Gate-wise benchmark results show that existing methods do not necessarily provide reliable controllability in deployment-oriented practical settings. In addition, mechanism-level diagnostics indicate that many steering methods induce prompt-conditional alignment rather than stable latent directional shifts, further explaining their fragility under stress. FaithSteer-BENCH therefore provides a unified benchmark and a clearer analytical lens for future method design, reliability evaluation, and deployment-oriented research in steering.
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