Controlling Language and Diffusion Models by Transporting Activations

The increasing capabilities of large generative models and their ever more widespread deployment have raised concerns about their reliability, safety, and potential misuse. To address these issues, recent works have proposed to control model generation by steering model activations in order to effectively induce or prevent the emergence of concepts or behaviours in the generated output. In this paper we introduce Activation Transport (AcT), a general framework to steer activations guided by optimal transport theory that generalizes many previous activation-steering works. AcT is…