hotwire-vllm

pip install hotwire-vllm

Activation steering for vLLM that doesn't turn off the engine.

For teams running vLLM in production who need per-request activation steering at native speed — CUDA graphs and torch.compile intact.

Status: instrument. hotwire is serving infrastructure — it makes per-request steering possible in production; whether steering behaves well there is an open research question, studied as work in progress (small N, not enough statistics yet) in steering-mechanics.

Every steering tool for vLLM that installs without forking it (vllm-lens, EasySteer, IBM's vLLM Hook) forces enforce_eager=True: PyTorch forward hooks don't survive CUDA graph capture, so they disable CUDA graphs and torch.compile for the whole server — every request pays, steered or not. Fine for research, a non-starter for production.

hotwire keeps the graphs. The steering addition is a custom torch op (Triton kernel) that gets baked into the captured graph; per-request routing happens by updating the contents of persistent GPU buffers between graph replays — the graph reads fresh data at the same addresses.

The technique was proven viable in RhizoNymph's vLLM fork (see RFC #36998, where in-flight steering is explicitly deferred to "Phase 2"). hotwire packages it as an out-of-tree plugin: pip install, no fork, registered via vLLM's official general_plugins entry point.

⚡ Run in 30 s

pip install hotwire-vllm                  # registers the vllm.general_plugins entry point
export HOTWIRE_VECTORS=/path/to/vectors   # dir of .pt files (or one .pt): (n_layers, hidden), or a single-layer (hidden,) vector
vllm serve Qwen/Qwen3-4B-Instruct-2507    # CUDA graphs stay ON

No vector yet? python -m hotwire.verify makes a throwaway one and checks the whole path on your GPU.

HOTWIRE_VECTORS accepts a directory of .pt files or a single .pt; each file is a (n_layers, hidden) matrix or a (hidden,) vector usable at any layer (a dict-wrapped tensor works too — the first tensor wins). The vector id is the file name without .pt.

Steer any request by id + layer + scale:

# offline
SamplingParams(extra_args={"hotwire": '{"id": "tesla_car", "layer": 20, "scale": 1.5}'})

# OpenAI API
curl .../v1/chat/completions -d '{..., "vllm_xargs":
  {"hotwire": "{\"id\": \"tesla_car\", \"layer\": 20, \"scale\": 1.5}"}}'

Unsteered requests — including batchmates of steered ones — are untouched. Malformed specs and unknown vector ids degrade to "unsteered", never to a failed request.

Optional per-entry flag "decode_only": true skips every multi-token span (the prefill) and steers single-token decode steps only — use it for vectors calibrated on generation-only steering (research rigs typically don't steer the prefill; applying such a vector to a long prompt as well multiplies the effective dose and can wreck coherence).

Lab twin: brainscope accepts this exact spec and wire format — calibrate a vector under its lenses (its export_hotwire ships .pt files with a regime passport), deploy it here unchanged, and replay production conversations back under the lens when a vector misbehaves.

Verify on your hardware

Two commands, ~3 minutes on any CUDA box with vLLM installed:

pip install hotwire-vllm
python -m hotwire.verify --model Qwen/Qwen3-0.6B   # any HF model id works

It generates a throwaway steering vector for the model, checks that steering fires, that unsteered requests (including batchmates) are untouched, and compares decode cost idle vs all-steered — then prints a report block. Please paste the report into an issue, especially from hardware, model families, or configs (TP > 1, 7B+, H100s) the tables below don't cover yet — that's currently the most useful contribution this project can receive.

Design

Three persistent GPU tensors, allocated at model-load time:

buffer	shape	role
bank	(n_slots, hidden)	steering vectors, one per active slot
scales	(n_slots,)	per-slot multiplier
slot_map	(n_layers, max_tokens)	token → slot per layer, -1 = untouched

The op, called at the end of each decoder layer's forward:

hidden[tok] += scales[slot] * bank[slot]   where slot = slot_map[layer, tok] >= 0

• Graph-safe: the op is torch.library.custom_op with a fake impl — opaque to torch.compile, captured into CUDA graphs as a fixed kernel on fixed addresses. Steering on/off/vector changes are buffer content updates between replays (host-side copy), never a re-capture.
• Per-request: a thin wrapper on the model runner (execute_model on the classic runner, prepare_inputs on V2) reads each step's req_ids and per-request token spans — the same bookkeeping vllm-lens validated — and fills slot_map before the graph replays.
• Nothing executable crosses the wire: vectors are preloaded operator-side from $HOTWIRE_VECTORS (.pt tensors, loaded with weights_only=True); a request only names one by id + layer + scale in vllm_xargs. Runtime HTTP registration is on the roadmap.
• Zero cost when idle: slot_map all -1 → kernel early-exits per token; idle and fully-steered decode are both within noise of vanilla (numbers).

Relative-dose guardrail

Raw scale isn't comparable across layers or models — it says nothing about how much of the residual stream a vector is overwriting. The dimensionless quantity that is comparable is the relative dose:

relative_dose(layer) = |scale| * ||V[layer]|| / ||h[layer]||

where ||h[layer]|| is the residual-stream norm at that layer at deployment-representative sequence length. steering-mechanics found coherence collapse sets in around relative dose ~1.9, with safe working points around ~0.7 (Qwen3-4B/L20; small N, treat as provisional) — raw scale alone can't tell you which side of that line a request is on.

hotwire can check this at request admission time (host-side, before a scale is written into the GPU scales buffer — never inside the CUDA graphs) if you give it a reference ||h|| per layer:

export HOTWIRE_H_NORMS=/path/to/h_norms.json   # {"20": 54.9, "21": 55.3, ...}, or hidden-directions' measure-h-norms output
export HOTWIRE_MAX_REL_DOSE=1.5                # reject entries over 1.5 — the request still runs, unsteered (default mode)
# export HOTWIRE_MAX_REL_DOSE=warn             # ...or just log every dose, never block
# export HOTWIRE_MAX_REL_DOSE=1.5 HOTWIRE_REL_DOSE_MODE=clamp   # ...or clamp scale down to the limit instead

Produce h_norms.json with hidden-directions measure-h-norms --model … --out h_norms.json (hidden-directions), or your own forward pass at deployment-representative input length (short prompts understate ||h|| by ~7× — massive-activation sink tokens dominate a short mean and dilute to nothing at length), mapping layer index to mean ||h|| at that layer. Vector norms (||V[layer]||) are computed once, at vector load time, from the .pt files already loaded via $HOTWIRE_VECTORS.

Unconfigured (HOTWIRE_MAX_REL_DOSE unset, the default): zero overhead, no behavior change — same as hotwire without this feature. Configured without an HOTWIRE_H_NORMS table: a single startup warning, then every entry is "unmonitored" (registered as requested; there's no reference norm to judge it against). Every graded admission logs one line:

hotwire: dose id='tesla_car' layer=20 scale=8.0 ||V||=13.2200 h_norm=54.9000 rel_dose=1.9260 exceeds max 1.5000 action=rejected, entry not registered

Like every other steering failure mode in hotwire, "rejected" degrades that one (vector, layer, scale) entry to unsteered — logged loudly, but it never fails the underlying request (see the gotchas in AGENTS.md). Reject vs. clamp is a deployment choice: reject makes bad configs visible immediately; clamp keeps serving at the loudest dose still considered safe.

Layout

• hotwire/_kernel.py — Triton kernel + hotwire::steer custom op
• hotwire/_bank.py — slot allocation, vector registration
• hotwire/_patch.py — vLLM integration: decoder-layer wrapping before compile, per-step slot_map fill from the scheduler's token spans (both model runners), compile-cache salting
• hotwire/_state.py — per-process state: the persistent GPU buffers the graphs read, loaded vectors, dose policy
• hotwire/_dose.py — relative-dose guardrail (host-side admission check)
• hotwire/wire.py — JSON/safetensors vector wire format, no pickle
• hotwire/verify.py — python -m hotwire.verify, the one-command hardware report
• benchmarks/bench_decode.py — TTFT / TPOT, idle vs steered vs eager

Status

Working end-to-end on vLLM 0.25.1, both model runners (the classic GPUModelRunner and the new V2 runner that 0.25.1 selects by default for dense generate models), with CUDA graphs captured (PIECEWISE + FULL) and torch.compile on. Verified on Qwen3-0.6B / Qwen3-4B on a single 16 GB GPU: solo steering, mixed batches, decode-phase graph replays.

hotwire also salts vLLM's torch.compile/AOT cache key (VllmConfig.compute_hash) — the op is traced into the compiled model, and vLLM's cache doesn't know about plugins, so without the salt a stale cache silently serves a model with no steering op in it.

Tests: pytest (unit, CPU-safe), pytest -m integration (real engine, GPU; HOTWIRE_TEST_MODEL overrides the default Qwen3-0.6B). HOTWIRE_DEBUG=1 appends a per-process trace of plugin registration and slot fills to /tmp/hotwire_dbg.log — vLLM's worker processes don't forward the plugin's logger, so this is the way to see whether the patch actually engaged.

Verified architectures (chaos-vector A/B + batchmate-isolation check, both model runners exercised):

model	steering works	unsteered untouched	TPOT idle → all-steered
Qwen3-14B-AWQ (4-bit)	✓	✓	1.91 → 1.91 ms/tok
Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct-AWQ	✓	✓	1.10 → 1.10 ms/tok
Qwen3-8B-FP8	✓	✓	2.27 → 2.28 ms/tok
Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.2-AWQ	✓	✓	0.94 → 0.94 ms/tok
Qwen3-4B-Instruct-2507	✓	✓	1.78 → 1.78 ms/tok
Qwen3-0.6B	✓	✓	—
Qwen2.5-1.5B-Instruct	✓	✓	0.77 → 0.77 ms/tok
Phi-3.5-mini-instruct	✓	✓	1.73 → 1.73 ms/tok
tiny-aya-water (Cohere)	✓	✓	1.54 → 1.54 ms/tok

Quantized checkpoints work — steering touches the residual stream, not the weights, and the AWQ / FP8 rows above confirm it end-to-end, CUDA graphs captured (PIECEWISE + FULL).

Models that still OOM on the 16 GB test GPU before the plugin engages: OLMo-2-7B, command-r7b, Qwen3.5-4B, gpt-oss-20b (13.8 GiB weight load succeeds, engine init doesn't), gemma-4-E4B-it (vision tower). No architecture failure observed yet; reports from bigger cards welcome. The layer patch targets any *DecoderLayer module with the standard (positions, hidden_states, residual) signature.

Numbers

Qwen3-4B-Instruct-2507, bf16, RTX 4070 Ti SUPER 16 GB, 8 concurrent requests, 256 decode tokens each, medians of 3 (benchmarks/bench_decode.py):

condition	TTFT	decode TPOT
vanilla vLLM (plugin not installed)	4.9 ms	1.78 ms/tok
hotwire installed, no request steered	4.9 ms	1.78 ms/tok
hotwire, all 8 requests steered	4.6 ms	1.78 ms/tok
vLLM enforce_eager (no plugin)	5.0 ms	1.88 ms/tok

Idle and fully-steered are both within noise of vanilla. The eager row is what hook-based steering tools pay before their Python hooks even run.

Batch sweep (same model/GPU): the eager tax grows with batch pressure — +2.3% at 1 request (batch-1 decode is weight-streaming-bound, which hides launch overhead), +4.7% at 2, +5.6% at 8. hotwire's idle == steered holds at every batch size, to the second decimal.

batch	graphs idle	graphs all-steered	eager
1	13.69 ms/tok	13.69	14.00
2	6.97 ms/tok	6.97	7.30
8	1.78 ms/tok	1.78	1.88

Limitations

Untested configurations (no known issues, but nobody has run them — treat as unsupported until someone does): tensor parallel > 1, pipeline parallel, speculative decoding, LoRA, GPTQ and MXFP4 quantization (AWQ and FP8 are verified — see the table). Issues welcome.

Known limitation: one vector per (layer, token) — multiple spec entries targeting the same layer don't stack; the last one wins. Different layers compose fine. Workaround: pre-combine same-layer vectors into one .pt (a*v1 + b*v2) and register the combo; native stacking is on the roadmap.

Known limitation: the slot budget. Steering configs live in a fixed-size GPU table allocated before graph capture — CUDA graphs read fixed addresses, so it can never grow at runtime. Size it with HOTWIRE_SLOTS (default 16; a slot is one vector row, ~5 KB on a 4B model, so 256 costs ~1.3 MB and nothing per token). Each distinct (vector, layer, scale) combo occupies one slot permanently — nothing frees slots when requests finish. A fixed catalog of vectors at fixed scales therefore runs forever, but continuously varying scales (0.80, 0.83, 0.87, …) mint a fresh slot each and exhaust the table; once full, requests with an unregistrable combo run unsteered (logged) while already-registered combos keep working, batchmates included. Workaround today: round scales to a small fixed palette and set HOTWIRE_SLOTS generously at startup. The real fixes are on the roadmap below — slots can recycle (the scale isn't baked into the stored vector; the kernel reads it separately at replay), it's bookkeeping, not graph physics.

Roadmap

• HTTP vector registration at runtime (via vllm.endpoint_plugins; hotwire/wire.py already holds the pickle-free wire format), replacing startup-only $HOTWIRE_VECTORS.
• Slot eviction: refcount slots per in-flight request and release() when the last user of a combo finishes, so the table recycles instead of filling.
• Per-token scales: key slots by (vector, layer) only and move scale into a per-token buffer — continuous intensities without minting new slots.
• Norm-matched and position-targeted steering modes.
• Tracking the RFC vllm-project/vllm#36998 Phase 2 interface as it lands.

Where this sits in the lab

flowchart LR
    hd["🧭 hidden-directions<br/>behavior → vector"]
    bs(["🧠 brainscope<br/>watch the model think"])
    hw["🔥 hotwire-vllm<br/>steering in production"]
    st["🕹️ steeropathy<br/>agents talk via activations"]
    tm["⚖️ in-two-minds<br/>agent hesitating between tools"]
    sm["🧪 steering-mechanics<br/>how steering actually works"]
    on["📰 old-news<br/>stale history vs system prompt"]

    hd -->|vectors| bs
    hd -->|vector| hw
    bs -->|vector + passport| hw
    bs --> st
    bs --> tm
    bs -->|causal replay| sm
    bs --> on
    hw -.->|vector under study| sm

    click hd "https://github.com/moudrkat/hidden-directions"
    click bs "https://github.com/moudrkat/brainscope"
    click hw "https://github.com/moudrkat/hotwire-vllm"
    click st "https://github.com/moudrkat/steeropathy"
    click tm "https://github.com/moudrkat/in-two-minds"
    click sm "https://github.com/moudrkat/steering-mechanics"
    click on "https://github.com/moudrkat/old-news"

    classDef dim fill:#f6f8fa,stroke:#d0d7de,color:#57606a;
    classDef here fill:#8957e5,stroke:#6e40c9,color:#ffffff;
    class hd,bs,hw,st,tm,sm,on dim;
    class hw here;

Highlighted = this repo. The full lab map (with the other repos' stories) lives on moudrkat.