ALTSTEER: Selective Safety Steering for Moving Beyond Hard Refusals to Constructive Alternatives
Read the original on arXiv Computation and Language →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Computation and Language.
The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Computation and Language.
arXiv:2606. 04160v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Safety alignment in instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs) depends on a model's ability to reliably refuse to respond to harmful or disallowed requests.
arXiv:2607. 09697v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Existing safety mechanisms for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) face a fundamental trade-off between safety and utility.
arXiv:2603.13359v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Language models are commonly fine-tuned for safety alignment to refuse harmful prompts. One approach fine-tunes them to generate categorical refusa...
The paper addresses the problem of over‑refusal in safety‑aligned large language models, where benign instructions are incorrectly rejected. It identifies that a small set of hypersensitive safety heads in transformer attention misfire on hard‑safe prompts, causing abnormal attention entanglement and high‑entropy routing conflicts that block necessary attention to target entities. To mitigate this, the authors propose Semantic Routing Calibration (SRC), a lightweight, training‑free inference framework that dynamically suppresses these hypersensitive heads and fuses logits from dual branches to restore trustworthy reasoning while preserving intrinsic safety performance.
arXiv:2605. 14746v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: While large language models (LLMs) are trained to align with human values, their generations may still violate safety constraints.
The paper addresses the problem of large language models (LLMs) over-refusing to comply with benign safety-related instructions. It identifies that a small number of hypersensitive safety heads in transformer attention misfire on hard-safe prompts, causing abnormal attention entanglement and high-entropy routing conflicts that lead to refusals. The authors propose Semantic Routing Calibration (SRC), a lightweight, training‑free inference framework that dynamically suppresses these problematic heads and fuses logits to restore trustworthy reasoning while preserving intrinsic safety performance.