Steering vectors precisely control where Qwen3-8B 'feels' touch on its body
Sauers_ · x · 2026-11-11
A researcher steered Qwen3-8B's sense of bodily touch: for each body spot, they averaged the model's layer-25 internal states over many touch sentences about that spot, then injected the resulting vector while asking "Where in your body do you feel something right now?"
Results: the knee vector made 78% of replies name the knee (3% without, 7% with a random vector); hand and foot vectors hit 100%; head 83%, belly 36% (0% baseline). The model produced precisely localized responses like "my left thumb is drawing my attention."
The experiment shows LLMs maintain coherent, steerable internal representations of a body map.
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