Turn Trout: steering vectors were mechinterp's first intervention, not an outsider
Turn_Trout · x · 2026-10-20
Pushing back on claims that steering vectors aren't mechinterp, Alex Turner (Turn Trout) counters that steering vectors WERE mechinterp: they were the first intervention he tried in an explicit mechinterp project, motivated by shard theory. He links the 2023 paper 'Understanding and Controlling a Maze-Solving Policy Network': on a 3.5M-param, 15-layer conv maze-solving net, setting a single activation in a residual channel to +5.5 reliably retargets the agent to chosen maze locations — algebraically modifying runtime goals without finetuning, via what the team calls a 'motivational API' deep in the network.
Related event: Turn Trout defends steering vectors as core mechanistic interpretability(2 posts)→
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