Pith Number

pith:MXWQVYC4

pith:2026:MXWQVYC4O52MSNQTI5RWB2TLRR

not attested not anchored not stored refs pending

Activation Steering for Aligned Open-ended Generation without Sacrificing Coherence

Alberto Tosato, Gauthier Gidel, Martin Zborowski, Niklas Herbster, Tommaso Tosato

Activation steering recovers honesty and compassion in LLMs during generation without harming coherence.

arxiv:2604.08169 v2 · 2026-04-09 · cs.AI

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\usepackage{pith}
\pithnumber{MXWQVYC4O52MSNQTI5RWB2TLRR}

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Record completeness

1 Bitcoin timestamp

2 Internet Archive

3 Author claim open · sign in to claim

4 Citations open

5 Replications open

✓ Portable graph bundle live · download bundle · merged state

The bundle contains the canonical record plus signed events. A mirror can host it anywhere and recompute the same current state with the deterministic merge algorithm.

Claims

C1strongest claim

All methods substantially recover target traits (honesty and compassion) while preserving coherence. StTP and StMP better maintain general capabilities (MMLU, MT-Bench, AlpacaEval) and produce less repetition in multi-turn conversations.

C2weakest assumption

That malicious system prompts function as a valid controlled proxy for broader misalignment triggers including adversarial prompts, benign fine-tuning, emergent misalignment, and goal misgeneralization.

C3one line summary

Projection-aware activation steering using logistic regression recovers honesty and compassion under malicious prompts while preserving coherence and benchmark performance better than uniform steering.

Receipt and verification

First computed	2026-07-03T01:16:53.054940Z
Builder	pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1
Signature	Pith Ed25519 (`pith-v1-2026-05`) · public key
Schema	pith-number/v1.0

Canonical hash

65ed0ae05c7774c93613476360ea6b8c582bb5999ee2b9843679446a72605544

Aliases

arxiv: 2604.08169 · arxiv_version: 2604.08169v2 · doi: 10.48550/arxiv.2604.08169 · pith_short_12: MXWQVYC4O52M · pith_short_16: MXWQVYC4O52MSNQT · pith_short_8: MXWQVYC4

Agent API

Resolver JSON Graph JSON Events JSON Schema Signing key

Verify this Pith Number yourself

curl -sH 'Accept: application/ld+json' https://pith.science/pith/MXWQVYC4O52MSNQTI5RWB2TLRR \
  | jq -c '.canonical_record' \
  | python3 -c "import sys,json,hashlib; b=json.dumps(json.loads(sys.stdin.read()), sort_keys=True, separators=(',',':'), ensure_ascii=False).encode(); print(hashlib.sha256(b).hexdigest())"
# expect: 65ed0ae05c7774c93613476360ea6b8c582bb5999ee2b9843679446a72605544

Canonical record JSON

{
  "metadata": {
    "abstract_canon_sha256": "d6bd77c30842d2b074ca98fbc6b53310614751d51a126ed3fea9a3ce870e7c61",
    "cross_cats_sorted": [],
    "license": "http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/",
    "primary_cat": "cs.AI",
    "submitted_at": "2026-04-09T12:28:22Z",
    "title_canon_sha256": "b7ac2178cdb7bf7901ff45250307135d1c9aa1c6e0263c373383eb23cb847deb"
  },
  "schema_version": "1.0",
  "source": {
    "id": "2604.08169",
    "kind": "arxiv",
    "version": 2
  }
}