Understanding Reasoning in Thinking Language Models via Steering Vectors

Show your work: Scratchpads for intermediate computation with language models, 2021

Maxwell Nye, Anders Johan Andreassen, Guy Gur-Ari, Henryk Michalewski, Jacob Austin, David Bieber, David Dohan, Aitor Lewkowycz, Maarten Bosma, David Luan, Charles Sutton, and Augustus Odena · 2021

Earlier work this paper cites.

Prompt programming for large language models: Beyond the few-shot paradigm, 2021

Laria Reynolds and Kyle McDonell · 2021

Earlier work this paper cites.

Locating and editing factual associations in gpt

Kevin Meng, David Bau, Alex Andonian, and Yonatan Belinkov · 2022

Earlier work this paper cites.

Extracting Latent Steering Vectors from Pretrained Language Models

Nishant Subramani, Nivedita Suresh, and Matthew E. Peters · 2022

Earlier work this paper cites.

Chain-of-thought prompting elicits reasoning in large language models

Jason Wei, Xuezhi Wang, Dale Schuurmans, Maarten Bosma, Brian Ichter, Fei Xia, Ed H. Chi, Quoc V. Le, and Denny Zhou · 2022

Earlier work this paper cites.

Inference-Time Intervention: Eliciting Truthful Answers from a Language Model

Kenneth Li, Oam Patel, Fernanda Viégas, Hanspeter Pfister, and Martin Wattenberg · 2023

Earlier work this paper cites.

Attribution patching: Activation patching at industrial scale

Neel Nanda · 2023

Earlier work this paper cites.

Steering Llama 2 via Contrastive Activation Addition

Nina Panickssery, Nick Gabrieli, Julian Schulz, Meg Tong, Evan Hubinger, and Alexander Matt Turner · 2023

Earlier work this paper cites.

Attribution patching outperforms automated circuit discovery

Aaquib Syed, Can Rager, and Arthur Conmy · 2023

Cited alongside, same era.

Steering Language Models With Activation Engineering

Alexander Matt Turner, Lisa Thiergart, Gavin Leech, David Udell, Juan J. Vazquez, Ulisse Mini, and Monte MacDiarmid · 2023

Cited alongside, same era.

Representation Engineering: A Top-Down Approach to AI Transparency

Andy Zou, Long Phan, Sarah Chen, James Campbell, Phillip Guo, Richard Ren, Alexander Pan, Xuwang Yin, Mantas Mazeika, Ann-Kathrin Dombrowski, Shashwat Goel, Nathaniel Li, Michael J. Byun, Zifan Wang, Alex Mallen, Steven Basart, Sanmi Koyejo, Dawn Song, Matt Fredrikson, J. Zico Kolter, and Dan Hendrycks · 2023

Cited alongside, same era.

OpenAI o3 Breakthrough High Score on ARC-AGI-Pub, December 2024

François Chollet · 2024

Cited alongside, same era.

How to think step-by-step: A mechanistic understanding of chain-of-thought reasoning, 2024

Original

Subhabrata Dutta, Joykirat Singh, Soumen Chakrabarti, and Tanmoy Chakraborty · 2024

Cited alongside, same era.

Qwq: Reflect deeply on the boundaries of the unknown, 11 2024

Qwen Team · 2024

Later among the works it cites.

Scaling monosemanticity: Extracting interpretable features from claude 3 sonnet

Adly Templeton, Tom Conerly, Jonathan Marcus, Jack Lindsey, Trenton Bricken, Brian Chen, Adam Pearce, Craig Citro, Emmanuel Ameisen, Andy Jones, Hoagy Cunningham, Nicholas L Turner, Callum McDougall, Monte MacDiarmid, C. Daniel Freeman, Theodore R. Sumers, Edward Rees, Joshua Batson, Adam Jermyn, Shan Carter, Chris Olah, and Tom Henighan · 2024

Later among the works it cites.

Activation addition: Steering language models without optimization

Original

Alexander Matt Turner, Lisa Thiergart, Gavin Leech, David Udell, Juan J. Vazquez, Ulisse Mini, and Monte MacDiarmid · 2024

Later among the works it cites.

Deepseek-r1: Incentivizing reasoning capability in llms via reinforcement ‘learning, 2025

DeepSeek-AI · 2025

Closest in time.

Under the hood of a reasoning model, 2025

Dron Hazra, Max Loeffler, Murat Cubuktepe, Levon Avagyan, Liv Gorton, Mark Bissell, Owen Lewis, Thomas McGrath, and Daniel Balsam · 2025