Safety Detection Classifier

Activation Steering for Synthetic Safety Data Generation: Diversity as a Critical Quality Axis

This paper investigates whether activation steering (AS) can generate high-quality synthetic training data for downstream safety detection classifiers, filling a gap in the literature. Across 4 safety concepts × 2 models × 4 steering methods, the authors find that AS-generated data outperforms prompt-generated data on 3 of 4 concepts, but only 41 of 136 configurations succeed, indicating a narrow effective regime. The study introduces sample- and set-level diversity as a previously absent quality axis, finding that higher steering strength reduces diversity and that the harmonic mean of success, coherence, and diversity correlates more reliably with downstream AUROC than prior metrics alone. The results provide a practical heuristic for practitioners tuning AS hyperparameters for safety data generation.