PIVOT: Preference-based Intervention Vectors for Pedagogical Tutor Steering
Fares Fawzi, Jiaxu Zhao, Tanya Nazaretsky, Tanja Käser
Abstract
LLMs are increasingly used for conversational tutoring, but effective tutoring requires more than correct answers. Tutors must choose when to scaffold reasoning, hint, give feedback, explain, or invite reflection. Existing prompting and training methods improve pedagogical alignment, but lack reliable inference-time control over pedagogical strategies. We introduce PIVOT, an activation-steering framework that learns preference-based intervention vectors online for frozen LLM tutors. PIVOT uses a seven-category tutor-move taxonomy and a generate-label-optimise loop, where a human-validated LLM judge identifies target and confusable non-target moves to construct preference pairs for multi-layer residual-stream steering. Across held-out and out-of-domain tutoring data, PIVOT controls tutor moves while preserving relevance and fluency, and its directions can be scaled, transferred, and composed at inference time. In a user study with 30 teachers, 73.3% of participants preferred steered conversations over neutral baseline interactions using the same prompt, and rated the controls as clear, usable, and pedagogically meaningful.
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Classified with taxonomy v2 on Sat, 5 Sept 2026.