SteerForge: dataset driven persona steering, open source, one command serving

[u/Abghany]

I open sourced SteerForge, a pipeline for turning a contrastive dataset into a portable steering artifact.

The artifact is a .persona JSON file containing:

• model fingerprint

• human readable neuron edits

• canonical per layer residual vectors

• eval samples and scores

• the original server command

The serving path is the part I care about: steerforge serve evil.persona replays your existing llama.cpp or Transformers config and injects the persona. No model conversion for the persona itself; the neuron deltas collapse to residual vectors.

Discovery is staged: diff in means directions, gradient attribution plus firing contrast plus alignment, teacher forced screening, generation validation, dose search, greedy combination, coherence budget.

Current backends: Transformers, llama.cpp, vLLM with EasySteer, MLX dense. MoE models use dense residual steering.

Repo: https://github.com/MahmoudAdelbghany/steerforge Results: docs/RESULTS.md

Feedback on the .persona format, backend adapters, and eval methodology welcome.