arXiv AI

Minimizing Targeted Activations: Input-Only Suppression of Evaluation-Awareness Latents in Large Language Models

arXiv:2607. 25907v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Activation steering controls model behavior by editing internal activations at inference time.

arXiv AI
Aug 20

Latent Space Refusal Anchoring for Low-Resource African Languages: Mechanistic Safety Recovery Without Retraining

The paper introduces Latent Space Refusal Anchoring (LSR‑Anchoring), a training‑free technique that extracts a refusal direction from English prompts and applies it to the residual stream of instruction‑tuned models at inference time. The primary variant, Mean‑Activation Steering (MAS), works across several architectures (Llama‑3‑8B, Llama‑3.1‑70B, Mistral‑7B‑Instruct, Qwen2.5‑7B), restoring safety for low‑resource African languages with minimal performance loss, while a refined SAE‑Derived Steering (SDS) further reduces KL divergence without degrading legitimate prompt performance. The method shows positive transfer for Yoruba, Igbo, Igala, and Hausa, but fails for Arabic, suggesting a geometric mismatch rather than a data scarcity issue.

By Godwin Abuh Faruna