The Steerability Challenge

The Steerability Challenge is a competition that tasks participants with designing steering interventions for large language models (LLMs) that achieve a target behavior while minimizing unintended side-effects. Submissions for the competition will be implemented using the AI Steerability 360 toolkit, which provides tooling for designing steering methods across various model control surfaces (prompting, activation steering, fine-tuning, and decoding) and the ability to construct compositions of interventions. The specific challenge task will require participants to design interventions that maximally reduce sycophantic behavior while minimizing the negative impact on general capabilities, as measured by a range of capability benchmarks. The competition aims to improve the community's understanding of how steering (especially under composed interventions) impacts general model behavior, and will consequently enable valuable insights into how LLMs can be reliably controlled in practice.