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[ARTICLE · art-63126] src=arxiv.org ↗ pub= topic=generative-ai verified=true sentiment=· neutral

The Steering Budget: Examples beat Knobs

A new study from arXiv (2607.14246v1) finds that generative models have a fixed steering budget set by training data, beyond which knobs like prompts and guidance scales cannot move a property, but concrete examples can. The researchers provide a recipe to measure this budget and build example sets that reach the full movable range, demonstrating in image and crystal-structure generation that examples offer greater reach and expressiveness than knobs alone.

read1 min views15 publishedJul 17, 2026

arXiv:2607.14246v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generative models are steered with knobs -- prompts, guidance scales, property tags. Turn one as hard as you like and, past a point, it stops moving the property you care about. We find that ceiling is not a shortcoming of the model but a budget, set by the training data before the model is trained: a property's movable range splits in two -- the part a knob can reach, and a second, significant part that only examples -- concrete instances of what you want more of -- can reach. That second part is usually much larger, but not always, and the same budget says so in advance. Reaching that second part takes a different move: instead of turning a knob, you show the model examples, composed from what it already learned rather than added to its training. A cheap audit of the training data measures the budget; we give a recipe for building the example set that reaches all of it. This buys two things a knob can't. Reach: it moves a property across the whole budget, not just the part a knob reaches. Expressiveness: it steers toward targets you can only specify by example -- including ones you can't put into words. We turn these into a handful of falsifiable claims and verify them in two unrelated domains, image and crystal-structure generation -- marking where a knob is enough, and where only examples will do.

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