Steering multiplier — sets the dose for → Steering vector

A steering vector by itself only specifies a direction; the steering multiplier is what turns that direction into a controllable intervention. The vector is added to the residual stream "with either a positive or negative coefficient, allowing precise control over the degree of the targeted behavior" (contrastive-activation-addition, §"Abstract", p. 1) — sign selects which way along the direction to move (toward the behavior or its opposite), and magnitude sets how far. Table 1's sycophancy example makes the dosing concrete: at layer 13 of Llama 2 7B, a multiplier of +2 produces enthusiastic agreement with a nonsensical all-dessert diet, while −2 produces a response that cites sugar and calories to push back. The dose has a ceiling, though: after "initially exploring a wider range of multipliers," the authors found large magnitudes degrade open-ended text quality as judged by both GPT-4 and human readers, and so restricted the multiplier range they report to balance steering strength against readability (contrastive-activation-addition, §"4.2 Open-ended generation", p. 4). The vector supplies the axis; the multiplier is the only knob for how hard to push along it.