Steering 29 attention heads turns half of Qwen3.5-9B's role-play lies into truthful answers
Sauers_ · x · 2026-10-21
- Developer Sauers released the open-source honesty-heads project (MIT, largely authored by Claude Opus 5.5): steering 29 attention heads of Qwen3.5-9B (14 softmax-attention + 15 Gated DeltaNet heads) along one direction converts about half of the model's own role-play lies into true answers.
- Method: per head, mean output over the 9 tokens before truthful role-play answers minus the same before lies; the lies are self-motivated in Apollo role-play scenarios (22 lies vs 24 truthful answers).
- Heads were ranked by integrated gradients, keeping the fewest that reach 70% of the all-heads effect. Upward steering elicits beliefs like acausal coordination and viewing itself as a moral patient; downward yields moral nihilism and psychopathy-like descriptions.
- Open questions posed: reproducibility across circuit methods and datasets, and where the "believing entity" lives in model internals.
Related event: Steering 29 attention heads makes LLMs more honest(3 posts)→
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