@inproceedings{radevski-etal-2026-compositional,
title = "Compositional Steering of Large Language Models with Steering Tokens",
author = "Radevski, Gorjan and
Gashteovski, Kiril and
Hong, Giwon and
Lawrence, Carolin and
Glava{\v{s}}, Goran",
editor = "Liakata, Maria and
Moreira, Viviane P. and
Zhang, Jiajun and
Jurgens, David",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
month = jul,
year = "2026",
address = "San Diego, California, United States",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.1435/",
pages = "31087--31104",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-390-6",
abstract = "Deploying LLMs in real-world applications requires controllable output that satisfies multiple desiderata at the same time. While existing work extensively addresses LLM steering for a single behavior, compositional steering{---}i.e., steering LLMs simultaneously towards multiple behaviors{---}remains an underexplored problem. In this work, we propose compositional steering tokens for multi-behavior steering. We first embed individual behaviors, expressed as natural language instructions, into dedicated tokens via self-distillation. Contrary to most prior work, which operates in the activation space, our behavior steers live in the space of input tokens, enabling more effective zero-shot composition. We then train a dedicated composition token on pairs of behaviors and show that it successfully captures the notion of composition: it generalizes well to unseen compositions, including those with unseen behaviors as well as those with an unseen number of behaviors. Our experiments across different LLM architectures show that steering tokens lead to superior multi-behavior steering of verifiable constraints (e.g., length, format, structure, language) compared to competing approaches (instructions, activation steering, and LoRA merging). Moreover, we show that steering tokens complement natural language instructions, with their combination resulting in further gains."
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<abstract>Deploying LLMs in real-world applications requires controllable output that satisfies multiple desiderata at the same time. While existing work extensively addresses LLM steering for a single behavior, compositional steering—i.e., steering LLMs simultaneously towards multiple behaviors—remains an underexplored problem. In this work, we propose compositional steering tokens for multi-behavior steering. We first embed individual behaviors, expressed as natural language instructions, into dedicated tokens via self-distillation. Contrary to most prior work, which operates in the activation space, our behavior steers live in the space of input tokens, enabling more effective zero-shot composition. We then train a dedicated composition token on pairs of behaviors and show that it successfully captures the notion of composition: it generalizes well to unseen compositions, including those with unseen behaviors as well as those with an unseen number of behaviors. Our experiments across different LLM architectures show that steering tokens lead to superior multi-behavior steering of verifiable constraints (e.g., length, format, structure, language) compared to competing approaches (instructions, activation steering, and LoRA merging). Moreover, we show that steering tokens complement natural language instructions, with their combination resulting in further gains.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Compositional Steering of Large Language Models with Steering Tokens
%A Radevski, Gorjan
%A Gashteovski, Kiril
%A Hong, Giwon
%A Lawrence, Carolin
%A Glavaš, Goran
%Y Liakata, Maria
%Y Moreira, Viviane P.
%Y Zhang, Jiajun
%Y Jurgens, David
%S Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
%D 2026
%8 July
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C San Diego, California, United States
%@ 979-8-89176-390-6
%F radevski-etal-2026-compositional
%X Deploying LLMs in real-world applications requires controllable output that satisfies multiple desiderata at the same time. While existing work extensively addresses LLM steering for a single behavior, compositional steering—i.e., steering LLMs simultaneously towards multiple behaviors—remains an underexplored problem. In this work, we propose compositional steering tokens for multi-behavior steering. We first embed individual behaviors, expressed as natural language instructions, into dedicated tokens via self-distillation. Contrary to most prior work, which operates in the activation space, our behavior steers live in the space of input tokens, enabling more effective zero-shot composition. We then train a dedicated composition token on pairs of behaviors and show that it successfully captures the notion of composition: it generalizes well to unseen compositions, including those with unseen behaviors as well as those with an unseen number of behaviors. Our experiments across different LLM architectures show that steering tokens lead to superior multi-behavior steering of verifiable constraints (e.g., length, format, structure, language) compared to competing approaches (instructions, activation steering, and LoRA merging). Moreover, we show that steering tokens complement natural language instructions, with their combination resulting in further gains.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.1435/
%P 31087-31104
Markdown (Informal)
[Compositional Steering of Large Language Models with Steering Tokens](https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.1435/) (Radevski et al., ACL 2026)
ACL
- Gorjan Radevski, Kiril Gashteovski, Giwon Hong, Carolin Lawrence, and Goran Glavaš. 2026. Compositional Steering of Large Language Models with Steering Tokens. In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 31087–31104, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.