VIAS: Value-Isolating Activation Steering for Multi-Value Alignment and Compliance for Organisations

Abstract

Organisations increasingly deploy large language model agents that must follow organisational values. We check whether activation steering, which adds vectors to a model's internal activations during generation without changing its weights, can improve compliance beyond prompting alone. Since most scenarios involve several values at once, we focus on multi-value steering. A simple way to build these vectors is to contrast responses that follow all values relevant to a scenario with responses that violate them. However, this gives nearly identical vectors for different values: they capture a general compliance signal rather than individual values, which limits their use when combining several values. We propose Value-Isolating Activation Steering (VIAS), which contrasts responses to the same scenario under two prompts, one listing all relevant values and one omitting a single target value. We keep a pair only if the target value changes from compliant to non-compliant and both responses still meet a minimum compliance level on the other values. We evaluate VIAS on PROTECT, a workplace compliance dataset where each scenario is tagged with relevant values from a 21-value taxonomy. VIAS reduces overlap between value vectors, making them better suited for multi-value steering, although this alone does not lead to independent control over each value. Combined with prompting, VIAS complies with every tagged value on 69.6% of scenarios for Qwen2.5-7B, 75.2% for Mistral-7B, and 72.6% for Phi-3.5-mini, outperforming prompting alone for all three models.