Steering a single neuron only works for concepts with good pretraining representation
Sauers_ · x · 2026-10-18
Replying to @repligate's question about steering a single neuron to elicit concepts, @Sauers notes the technique has limits: complex or multi-attribute entities don't steer well. His working hypothesis: if a concept already has good representation in pretraining, single-neuron steering tends to work; otherwise it fails — an empirical observation on the scope of activation steering in interpretability research.
Related event: Researchers probe the limits of single-neuron steering in language models(3 posts)→
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