Query-Adaptive Neuron Steering for LLMs

Yanxi Pan, Jingwen Wu, Yan Ma, Xiang Chen, Xinyi Zeng +6

Effectively eliciting the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) at inference time remains an important challenge. Existing studies address this challenge through context engineering, which shapes user queries, or fixed steering, which directly intervenes in model computation. However, predefined contexts and fixed intervention strategies may not adequately accommodate the diverse knowledge and reasoning requirements of individual queries. This raises a natural question: Can internal steering in LLMs be made query-adaptive? In this work, we investigate whether query-induced internal activations can guide adaptive steering in LLMs. Our pilot studies reveal subject- and layer-dependent neuron activation patterns and show that amplifying subject-relevant neurons can improve model performance. Based on these findings, we propose Q-NeuS, a query-adaptive neuron steering framework that dynamically determines which neurons to modulate and by how much for each input. Specifically, Q-NeuS constructs a compact subject-guided candidate neuron space and employs a lightweight Query-Adaptive Gate to generate neuron-wise modulation coefficients. To learn effective intervention strategies,…