“A conceptor by any other name” by Keenan Pepper
“A conceptor by any other name” by Keenan Pepper  
Podcast: LessWrong (30+ Karma)
Published On: Tue Jul 07 2026
Description: I just had one of those delightful moments where I have a very specific idea, and then I search for it (Claude Research in this case), and it turns out that people have already been using that exact concept but just calling it by a name I'd never heard of. That name is conceptor, but the basic construction is not new and has gone by many other names. What a conceptor is I'll quote from "Conceptors for Semantic Steering" (Triantafyllopoulos et al.) since I couldn't say it any better myself: Given a collection of neural activation vectors associated with a particular concept, the conceptor matrix is defined as the solution to the regularized reconstruction problem: where denotes the Frobenius norm and is the aperture parameter controlling the trade-off between faithfully preserving the activation patterns and regularization. Defining the sample correlation matrix , where has activation vectors as rows, the optimization admits the closed-form solution: This reveals the conceptor as a soft projection operator: rather than fully retaining or discarding each direction, continuously attenuates directions according to the signal energy in . That's it, that's the whole thing. But in case you're like me and your eyes glaze over just [...] ---Outline:(00:29) What a conceptor is(01:31) Persona transplantation example(02:52) Methods of transplanting a concept(04:54) Other names for this linear algebra structure(08:42) History and properties of conceptors(11:14) Operations on conceptors(13:25) From deep roots to modern LLM steering The original text contained 7 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: July 7th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9aZYJinAyxequjQbn/a-conceptor-by-any-other-name --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.