# Steering Side Effects

The authors introduce SteerScope, a two-axis, 15-metric evaluation suite for LLM activation steering, and benchmark 23 methods spanning 4 families (including prompting, LoRA, and SFT baselines) on Gemma-2-2B-it and Gemma-2-9B-it under matched models, tasks, and protocols; they find that no activation steering method achieves higher target efficacy without greater composite side effects, so none surpasses the Prompt Steering baseline on the efficacy–side-effect trade-off, and that efficacy and side effects rise together with intervention strength.

The authors introduce SteerScope, a two-axis, 15-metric evaluation suite for LLM activation steering, and benchmark 23 methods spanning 4 families (including prompting, LoRA, and SFT baselines) on Gemma-2-2B-it and Gemma-2-9B-it under matched models, tasks, and protocols; they find that no activation steering method achieves higher target efficacy without greater composite side effects, so none surpasses the Prompt Steering baseline on the efficacy–side-effect trade-off, and that efficacy and side effects rise together with intervention strength.