Controlling Tool Use with Heading-Specific Activation Steering

Abstract

arXiv:2607.05790v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tool-augmented large language models extend their capabilities beyond parametric knowledge through external tools, but tend to invoke them unnecessarily. We investigate whether tool-use decisions have any stable internal representation that can be extracted and manipulated, a question that is non-trivial given that tools exist entirely in context at inference time and have no direct encoding in model weights. We show that steering vectors extracted