Learning to Decide, Not to Reason: Parameter-Efficient Decision Operators via Low-Rank Activation Steering

Abstract:Injecting skills into a frozen language model currently costs a million parameters and a reinforcement-learning pipeline. We introduce \method{}, a System-1 decision operator trained by behavior cloning that lowers this cost by roughly two orders of magnitude. The default operator uses 330K parameters to match a 1.33M-parameter operator trained with reinforcement learning, exceeds or achieve comparable performance, while collapsing 3,685-token deliberation into a 6-token decision with no loss in accuracy. A rank-4 variant with 23K parameters, 1/58 of the strongest published skill operator, suffices for SearchQA and near-suffices for LiveMath, where higher rank still helps; the same recipe transfers across five tasks and three backbones, with out-of-distribution gains persisting on LiveMath problems released months after training. The gap to prior work is trainability, and it is set jointly by initialization and architecture: the initialization of prior operators zeroes the gradient of both large factor matrices at the first optimization step, whereas our zero-initialized output projection inside a shared low-rank backbone receives a gradient immediately, which a gradient-flow probe confirms directly. The gain isn't chain-of-thought compression: 23 of 57 LiveMath points beat the base model's best-of-8 sampling, and a logit-lens probe shows the operator amplifies the answer along the model's existing late-layer pathway, not writing it earlier. Gains track the base model's headroom across 13 base--task pairs, and skills compose as approximately linear operators that can be added, interpolated, and hot-swapped at inference time. Code on this https URL.

Machine Learning (cs.LG); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2610.06950 [cs.LG]

(or arXiv:2610.06950v1 [cs.LG] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.06950 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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