---
title: "IHLC@LT-EDI 2026 — paper by P and Jagadeeshan (2026)"
description: "The IHLC team describes its entries to the LT-EDI 2026 shared task on gender-inclusive language… 18 references, cited by 1 paper here."
authors: ["Akhil Rajeev P", "Manoj Balaji Jagadeeshan"]
year: 2026
venue: "Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Language Technology for Equality, Diversity, Inclusion"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/2026.ltedi-1.19/"
doi: "10.18653/v1/2026.ltedi-1.19"
licence: "CC BY 4.0 (ACL Anthology)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/p-2026-ihlc-lt-edi-2026-steering/"
---
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# IHLC@LT-EDI 2026: Steering Toward Inclusivity - A Representation Engineering for Gender-Neutral Rewriting

**Authors:** Akhil Rajeev P and [Manoj Balaji Jagadeeshan](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/manoj-balaji-jagadeeshan/) · **Year:** 2026 · **Venue:** [Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Language Technology for Equality, Diversity, Inclusion](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/ltedi/) ([Workshop on Language Technology for Equality, Diversity, Inclusion 2026](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/ltedi/2026/)) · **Publisher:** [Association for Computational Linguistics](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/publishers/association-for-computational-linguistics/) · **Licence:** [CC BY 4.0 (ACL Anthology)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/2026.ltedi-1.19/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/2026.ltedi-1.19.pdf) · [DOI 10.18653/v1/2026.ltedi-1.19](https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2026.ltedi-1.19) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W7166825976)

**Citations:** 0 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14) · 1 in our library, of the 149,439 papers whose bibliographies we read

## Summary
The IHLC team describes its entries to the LT-EDI 2026 shared task on gender-inclusive language generation, English track only. For Subtask A, which rewrites gendered sentences into neutral ones, the authors used standard LoRA fine-tuning. Their main contribution is Subtask B, which generates counter-narratives to overtly gender-biased claims without updating any weights. They collect Gemma-3-4B-it hidden states for paired biased and inclusive sentences and apply PCA to the activation differences. During generation, a forward hook adds the leading component, scaled by a coefficient α, to an intermediate layer. Strict one-line prompts and low-temperature decoding with a repetition penalty keep the outputs concise. Scoring used an LLM-as-a-judge with human spot checks. Subtask A scored 80.00% (3rd place), and Subtask B scored 78.12% (6th place). Subtask B outputs were rated polite and coherent but weaker on quality and relevance. A manual error study shows that steering often rewrites more than necessary. The work offers a low-compute alternative to fine-tuning for bias mitigation and documents where it breaks down.

## Key points
- Subtask A (LoRA): GA, GN and QR were all 80%, ranking 3rd of 9 teams.
- Subtask B (activation steering): PR was 84.89%, CCNC 84.79% and QR 64.68%, for an average of 78.12% and a rank of 6th of 7.
- Steering setup:
  - The steering vector is the first principal component of last-token difference vectors, injected at layer 16 of Gemma-3-4B-it.
  - The recommended α range is 0.6–1.2; elsewhere the paper cites 0.7–1.5.
  - Excessive α produced looping text and fused words.
- Manual analysis of 47 outputs found five failure modes:
  - faithfulness–edit trade-off: 53%
  - layer-specific entanglement: 23%
  - residual bias leakage: 11%
  - over-steering instability: 9%
  - repetition/degeneration: 4%
- Every steered output opened with the same generic template phrase, which departs from the minimal-edit ideal. Code is released as a Jupyter notebook (GitHub: manojbalaji1/IHLC-Gender-Inclusive).

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

## Institutions

- [Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/indian-institute-of-technology-kharagpur/) — University, Kharagpur, India · 25 works · 714 citations

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## Cite

Cite as: Akhil Rajeev P and Manoj Balaji Jagadeeshan. 2026. IHLC@LT-EDI 2026: Steering Toward Inclusivity - A Representation Engineering for Gender-Neutral Rewriting. Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Language Technology for Equality, Diversity, Inclusion.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@inproceedings{p2026ihlc,
  title = {{IHLC@LT-EDI 2026: Steering Toward Inclusivity - A Representation Engineering for Gender-Neutral Rewriting}},
  author = {Akhil Rajeev P and Manoj Balaji Jagadeeshan},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Language Technology for Equality, Diversity, Inclusion},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.18653/v1/2026.ltedi-1.19},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2026.ltedi-1.19}
}
```

- [← previous Igniters@LTEDI 2026: Multilingual Gender-Inclusive Language Generation with mT5 and Counter-Narrative Generation Using Llama-3](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/s-2026-igniters-ltedi-2026-multilingual-gender/)
- [next → IIIT-BGP IWSLT 2026 Systems for Low-resource ST](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/singh-2026-iiit-bgp-iwslt-2026-systems/)
- [↑ back to papers of 2026](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2026/page/13/)

## References

18 references, 11 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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*Updated 31 October 2026*