Beyond Bias Scores: Answerability Confounds in Activation Steering with Gradient-Constrained Direction Design (GCD)

Bias scores in language-model evaluations often conflate what a model prefers with whether it answers at all. We identify this confound in \textsc{BBQ}, whose ambiguous score factorizes into answerability and signed preference. Across 11 categories, 28,}824 items, and five models, contrastive steeri