Deep Noir: Autonomous Steering Discovery via Architectural Chronometry in Transformer Models

📅 2026-09-17
📈 Citations: 0
Influential: 0
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🤖 AI Summary
本文提出Deep Noir框架,通过Logit Lens收敛和因果头级归因自动发现最优的激活转向参数,以改进Transformer模型在不同任务中的表现。
📝 Abstract
Activation steering modifies LLM behavior at inference time, but identifying where and how strongly to steer remains manual. We introduce Deep Noir, a framework that uses Logit Lens convergence and causal head-level attribution to autonomously discover optimal steering parameters. Across three scales (1B x 3, 2-3B x 2, and 7-9B x 4), our engine achieves 16.7 percentage-point improvement on spam at 1B (standard deviation 4.7; 39 runs), with gains increasing to 21 to 42 percentage points at 7-9B across four architectures. On SST-2 sentiment, it achieves a 13.1 percentage-point improvement with zero code changes. Mechanistic grounding enables automated discovery of intervention points that generalize across tasks and architectures. On sentiment, RepE without head masking fails to improve over baseline, while Deep Noir improves all models (p less than 0.01). We further show that steering creates a predictable prompt-injection attack surface whose vulnerability increases monotonically with steering magnitude. This finding is relevant to agent systems deploying steered classifiers.
Problem

Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.

activation steering
large language models
optimal steering parameters
Innovation

Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.

Deep Noir
Logit Lens Convergence
Causal Head-level Attribution
Autonomous Steering Discovery
Prompt-injection Attack Surface
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