Samuel Vaiter

@CNRS Researcher

[Samuel Vaiter @vaiter]

Now I am become Death, the destroyer of Quotas.

[Samuel Vaiter @vaiter]

@scottnarmstrong But they told me to be nice with every sentient entities :(

[Samuel Vaiter @vaiter]

So, yelling at a LLM to simplify a Lean proof really works!

[Samuel Vaiter @vaiter]

@tonysilveti I don't want to look at my tokens usage this evening 🥹

[Samuel Vaiter @vaiter]

Now accepted at ICML 2026! Congrats to @MagamedTm

[Samuel Vaiter @vaiter]

🧵 New preprint! "Towards Understanding Steering Strength" with @MagamedTm and D. Garreau

Activation steering is a popular way to control LLM behavior at inference. But how much should you steer? We provide the first theoretical analysis of the steering strength α.

1/7

[Samuel Vaiter @vaiter]

TL;DR: Steering strength α has precise, predictable effects on LLM outputs. Understanding these laws may help design better steering strategies.

Paper: https://t.co/qwZAHqoN6L
Code: https://t.co/W0IbUQ7AZe

7/7

[Samuel Vaiter @vaiter]

🧵 New preprint! "Towards Understanding Steering Strength" with @MagamedTm and D. Garreau

Activation steering is a popular way to control LLM behavior at inference. But how much should you steer? We provide the first theoretical analysis of the steering strength α.

1/7

[Samuel Vaiter @vaiter]

We validate everything empirically on 11 models (GPT-2, Gemma 3, Qwen 3, Llama 2, Mistral 7B) across 8 safety-related concepts. All our theorems are confirmed experimentally.

6/7

[Samuel Vaiter @vaiter]

@SebAaltonen @IceSolst This is the same shit for every craft out there:
Oh look 500 hundreds songs a day
Oh look 1000 video game assets a day
Oh look 15k LOC a day
Oh look 50 videos post-processed a day

[Samuel Vaiter @vaiter]

@chanwoopark20 Maybe of interest to you: we derive a *local* Lipschitz constant of the softmax in this paper https://t.co/Vdu39cQwDh (Lemma H.6). It is local, but gives more information than the 1/2 that can be quite pessimistic for small perturbations.

[Samuel Vaiter @vaiter]

@Andrea__M Now *this* is science fiction!

[Samuel Vaiter @vaiter]

Pour s'inscrire et pour plus d'informations : https://t.co/YXELvdEMIP

Les orateurs et oratrices pléniers sont Pierre Ablin, Yann Brenier, Julie Delon, Stéphane Gaubert, Francisco J. Silva Álvarez (prix J.J Moreau) et Irène Waldspurger.

Attention, le nombre de place est limité !

[Samuel Vaiter @vaiter]

Les inscriptions aux journées MODE 2026 à Nice sont désormais ouvertes. Elles se dérouleront du 18 au 20 mars à l'Hôtel Saint-Paul.

Les inscriptions sont ouvertes jusqu'au 1 mars (majoration > 9/02). La deadline pour soumettre une communication est le **15 janvier**.

[Samuel Vaiter @vaiter]

I am at #NeurIPS2025, reach out if you want to chat!

[Transactions on Machine Learning Research @TmlrOrg]

🏅Finalist: Gradient Scarcity in Graph Learning with Bilevel Optimization, by Hashem Ghanem, @vaiter, @n_keriven 5/n
https://t.co/ElyPFkPEEG

[Fares El Khoury @fares_elkhoury]

Happy to be at #NeurIPS2025 in San Diego to present our poster ‘Learning Theory for Kernel Bilevel Optimization’ #3005, Fri at 4:30 p.m. Stop by/ping me to chat, especially about statistics, causality, generative models! Let's connect!

Joint w/ E. Pauwels, @vaiter, @MichaelArbel