README.md

Steering Llama 3 (and Llama 2)

Requirements:

pip install -r requirements

vLLM also requires:

pip install "outlines[serve]"

To generate steering vectors and activations:

python steering/generate_vectors.py <args>

To do open-ended generation with steering and/or concept editing:

python steering/steer.py <args>

To evaluate the resulting responses with Llama 3 70B:

python steering/eval.py <args>

To make plots:

python steering/plots.py (arguments are optional, will plot everything by default)

Note that these have to be called from steering-llama3/ (or with it in the Python path) in order for imports to work correctly.

gpu_graph and run files

I usually run experiments using the tool steering/gpu_graph.py, which takes a list of GPUs and a directed graph of shell commands and runs commands (after their dependencies) on any available GPU. The original command output is dumped into logs/.

runs/ contains a bunch of chronologically-named files that use gpu_graph to do various combinations of runs; these might be useful for getting a sense of the command arguments.

Command-line arguments

--help is available from argparse, but some details that might help:

• Settings for generation, steering, and evaluation are managed via the Settings class in steering/common.py. Note that generation takes a smaller subset of these settings.
• --behavior selects a dataset derived from Rimsky et al (must be used with --dataset openr or ab) for vector generation, and also selects a corresponding evaluation dataset.
• Behavior None (no command-line arg passed) is evaluated with separate batches of harmful and harmless prompts. If --dataset openr or ab is passed with behavior None, the refusal behavior is used to generate steering vectors, but the harmful/harmless prompts are used for evaluation.
• --residual generates steering vectors and applies steering to residual blocks, instead of to the residual stream directly. I usually use this together with --layer all but they are independently controlled.
• --scrub applies concept scrubbing and should only be used with --layer all --residual; I don't know what happens otherwise but it probably doesn't work.
• --toks controls where vectors and concept editors are applied (before for the prompt, after for the completion, or None for both).
• --logit only applies to datasets ab and abcon and relies on the A/B completion format.

Other files

There are some miscellaneous Python files and shell scripts kicking around for safekeeping, which probably shouldn't be on main. Some that are actually useful include:

• server.sh runs the vLLM server on GPU 0 and port 8005; once it's running, eval.py will look on port 8005 by default. As a more flexible alternative, you can run eval.py --server to start the vLLM server within the eval script. If you run multiple copies of eval.py, you should include --port with a distinct value for each.
• python smartcopy.py responses.tgz artifacts/responses/ (for example) extracts a compressed tarball into the directory provided, overwriting files only if the tarred version is larger. This is the correct way to merge responses across machines, because responses and their evaluation scores are (unfortunately) stored in the same file and you don't want to clobber evaluated ones with unevaluated ones.
• backup_ao.sh and backup_so.sh are tools for archiving artifacts/responses/ to sync between machines. They're somewhat hardcoded for my use case.