arXiv:2608.29109v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large language models often answer structurally unanswerable questions, such as computing cot(-540{\deg}) or evaluating (1).startswith("1"), instead of...
By Yucheng Du, Xiyang Hu
arXiv:2605. 21706v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Safety-aligned language models are trained to refuse harmful requests, yet refusal behavior can be suppressed by steering their internal representations.
By Giorgio Piras, Raffaele Mura, Fabio Brau, Maura Pintor, Luca Oneto, Fabio Roli, Battista Biggio
arXiv:2606. 13720v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Arditi et al.
By Elisabetta Rocchetti, Alfio Ferrara
arXiv:2608. 15772v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: When a language model refuses to answer a prompt, it is unclear whether the correct answer is erased from its internal representations, or merely suppressed at the output layer.
By Yiqi Liu, Yang Wang, Songxin Wang, Chenghao Xiao, Chenghua Lin
arXiv:2602. 06941v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models can recover mid-generation from task-misaligned activation steering, producing explicit verbal restarts (e.
By Alex McKenzie, Keenan Pepper, Stijn Servaes, Martin Leitgab, Murat Cubuktepe, Mike Vaiana, Diogo de Lucena, Judd Rosenblatt, Michael S. A. Graziano
The paper investigates how refusal training shapes the internal geometry of language models, showing that activation updates from refusal-completion losses create a distinct low‑dimensional refusal subspace. In a case study on OLMo‑2‑0425‑1B‑Instruct, the authors link the brittleness of refusal directions to repetitive refusal prefixes and demonstrate that using diverse refusal starts can increase the stable rank of gradients, thereby hardening the model against vector‑ablation attacks. The work provides insights into the emergence of safety‑critical features and offers a potential strategy to strengthen refusal robustness.
By Andrey Labunets