MAxBench: A Multinomial Concept Recovery Benchmark
MAxBench evaluates multinomial concept recovery methods, finding affine subspaces steer most reliably but none consistently beats prompting.
MAxBench is a geometry-agnostic evaluation framework for multinomial concept representations in language models, based on sampling from recovered concept representations. It compares 10 localization methods covering 5 geometry types across 6 concepts and 4 models. Findings show affine subspaces steer more reliably than rank-one or linear subspaces due to better non-zero offsets, manifold steering is competitive where applicable, and no method consistently outperforms prompting.