Journal article
A Control Knob Is Not a Concept: What a Working Steering Vector Licenses, Why Its Equivalence Class Is Set by the Readout That Scores It, and the Controls That Would Upgrade Control to Representation
(c) 2026 Pranay Mahendrakar. Licensed under CC BY 4.0. Adding a vector to a language model's residual stream and watching a behaviour change has become the field's most common argument that the model represents a concept along that vector. Refusal directions, persona vectors, truth directions and…