arxivcs.AI2026-07-20
Can We Break LLMs Out of Self-Loops? Fine-Grained Reasoning Control with Activation Steering
Sheldon Yu, Tong Yu, Xunyi Jiang, Rohan Surana, Gagan Mundada, Sungchul Kim, et al.
Extended reasoning has become standard for frontier Large Language Models (LLMs), yet the trajectories these models produce remain largely uncontrollable. Existing methods for shaping how a model reasons are prompt based approaches and operate at the input level, offering no fine…