Equation 25 · Part 11 · Probing, Sparse Autoencoders, Patching, and Steering: The Main Interpretability Methods, Compared
addition
addition
What this part means
Add the term after the plus sign to the term or group before it.
Its job in the formula
Add the term after the plus sign to the term or group before it.
Full expression→addition→Article meaning
The passage around this formula
The construction is a mean-difference direction, added back into the residual stream with a tunable strength at inference time: . where P and N index matched positive and negative examples of the target behaviour, is the residual-stream activation at layer , and is a coefficient the operator sets by hand. Nothing in this construction requires understanding why the network represents the concept along this direction, only that adding it produces the intended behavioural shift.
Learn the underlying idea
Addition combines quantities; subtraction measures the signed difference between them. Parentheses show what is combined before the rest of the expression is evaluated.
Open the illustrated addition and subtraction in an equation guide →
Sources cited in the article section
- [12] Representation Engineering: A Top-Down Approach to AI Transparency ↗
- [13] Steering Language Models With Activation Engineering ↗
- [14] Steering Llama 2 via Contrastive Activation Addition ↗
- [15] Analyzing the Generalization and Reliability of Steering Vectors ↗
These citations provide research context; check each source for the exact claim it supports.