Researchers have developed a method called activation steering to prevent language models from generating coherent but misaligned responses. They tested three methods on two threat models and found that they can recover alignment in language models. The best-performing method, Steer-to-Target-Projection, preserves general capabilities better than uniform steering. Additionally, the researchers showed that their honesty steering approach generalizes to out-of-distribution scenarios, improving performance on various benchmarks. --- Why it matters: This matters because it shows a potential lightweight defense against misalignment in language models, which can have significant implications for applications such as chatbots and virtual assistants. Source: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.08169