SwordBench B
AI benchmark · Vision
Full listing name: SwordBench: Evaluating Orthogonality of Steering Image Representations
What is SwordBench?
Steering or intervening on model representations at inference time to correct predictions is essential for AI interpretability and safety, yet existing evaluation protocols are limited to ambiguous language modeling tasks. To address this gap, we introduce SwordBench, a benchmark for steering image representations of vision models across multiple backbones and concept removal tasks. Beyond a unified benchmarking suite, we propose new evaluation notions that uncover the second-order effects of orthogonalization among concept activation vectors for pragmatic steering. Specifically, cross-concept robustness measures the stability of concept detection performance across inputs orthogonalized against alternative concepts, and collateral damage quantifies whether steering inadvertently affects model performance on a downstream task for inputs lacking the bias. We find that although a linear support vector machine exhibits superior separability and orthogonality, it fails to achieve zero collateral damage, often trailing sparse autoencoders. In simpler regimes, both standard baselines and optimization-based methods fail to achieve perfect steering. The source code will be made available soon on GitHub.
Tier B
Established: 15 or more models scored, or curated RL directories rate it.
How much stands behind a tier: usage, who backs it, a confirmed line from its own site or paper, and a clear read on X. High with three of the four, medium with two, low otherwise.
- 18 models scored
- in curated RL directories (1 pt)
How we got to tier B
- Adoption: 18 models scored. Tier B.
- Not yet read on X.
- In curated RL directories: 1 point, a floor of none.
- Not yet confirmed by a line from its own site or paper.
A clear view on X moves a tier one step up or down; most entries don't move. How tiers work.
Not on the map yet: no line from its own site or paper places it in a domain.
Next: browse all benchmarks. Entry from the RL Research daily scrape of public sources, 2026-10-11 snapshot.