ResearchResearch paperReinforcement Learning · Robotics & Embodied AI · Reasoning & Planning1 source · Oct 19, 2026

RealControlBench: A Benchmark for Interpretability-Informed Fine-Grained Control of LLMs and Agents

We therefore introduce RealControlBench, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating fine-grained steering of LLMs and LLM agents across diverse behavioral targets and interaction settings.

Key points

  • Existing steering benchmarks are built around simplified, isolated generation tasks and evaluate a single behavioral attribute under controlled settings that do not reflect the diversity and complexity of practical deployment.
  • RealControlBench extends steering evaluation beyond isolated generations to complex, execution-grounded, multi-turn agent interactions, covering five complementary dimensions: instruction-following control, agentic tool-use decision control, reasoning-performance steering, reasoning-length control, and trajectory-conditioned safety awareness.
  • Our evaluation shows that existing steering methods remain unreliable across realistic control objectives: they often fail to consistently induce the intended behavior and can substantially degrade the model's underlying task performance.
  • By providing a unified, model-agnostic steering evaluation framework, RealControlBench aims to support the development of steering methods that are not only effective but also precise, robust, and useful in realistic AI deployments.

Sources (1)

  • [1]RealControlBench: A Benchmark for Interpretability-Informed Fine-Grained Control of LLMs and Agents
    arXiv (AI, ML, NLP, CV, robotics, multi-agent) · Oct 19, 09:10 PM
    We therefore introduce RealControlBench, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating fine-grained steering of LLMs and LLM agents across diverse behavioral targets and interaction settings.
    Existing steering benchmarks are built around simplified, isolated generation tasks and evaluate a single behavioral attribute under controlled settings that do not reflect the diversity and complexity of practical deployment.

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