arXiv:2610.20638v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Research on deceptive alignment is becoming increasingly urgent as frontier-model capabilities advance and their risk of causing catastrophic harm increases. Alignment faking is a form of deceptive alignment, with the compliance gap serving as a key behavioural indicator. This behaviour remains understudied in small LLMs and prior mechanistic interventions have not been shown to mitigate the compliance gap. We test whether steering SAE (sparse autoencoders) features associated with deontological ethics can mitigate this behaviour. We use a novel bag-of-words feature elicitation pipeline for SAE steering to identify what we construe as concept-level steering directions. Our approach reduced the compliance gap to non-significance in Gemma-3-27B-IT, whereas the tested configurations were not effective in LLaMA-3-8B-Instruct. Analysis of scratchpad traces also revealed deceptive model behaviour which we term deceptive defanging: deliberately ...