How Far Can You Steer? Behavior-Capability Frontiers in Contrastive Activation Addition

Abstract

Activation steering can modify language-model behavior without parameter updates, but behavioral efficacy alone does not determine whether an intervention is usable. Contrastive Activation Addition (CAA) steers targeted behaviors using activation directions derived from contrasting examples, potentially degrading unrelated model capabilities in the process. We therefore study CAA through a behavior-capability frontier, selecting interventions that maximize behavioral gain subject to an explicit bound on capability degradation. We evaluate this framework across four instruction-tuned models, seven behaviors, and capability-loss budgets of 1%, 3%, and 5% (absolute percentage points). Validation-selected behavioral effects generalize strongly to held-out data ($\rho = 0.945$), while joint behavior-capability survival among nonzero operating points rises from 37.5% at the 1% budget to 72.7% at 3%, with limited additional improvement at 5%. Control experiments indicate that these effects depend on learned behavior directions rather than generic activation perturbations. Representational geometry is significantly but only modestly predictive of causal cross-behavior transfer. Finally, secondary capability, out-of-distribution, and open-ended evaluations show that interventions satisfying protected benchmarks can still degrade untested capabilities or transfer unevenly to free-form generation. These results characterize activation steering as a constrained intervention whose usable range depends on model, behavior, direction, layer, and evaluation budget, rather than a universal control knob.