Refusal Mechanisms in Language Models

Follow this topic Ask about this topic

Latest papers

46 papers5 papers in the last four weeks, against 2 the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

Does Context Compression Preserve Refusal Alignment?
Nov 4, 2026Anthony Nguyen, Wenjun LinLLM Context Compression Refusal Behavior in Language Models
Digital Innovation Lab, Faculty of Computer Science and Technology Algoma University, ON, Canada
Which Words a Model Fears: From a Refusal Direction to a Vocabulary-Wide Fear Lexicon
Nov 2, 2026Boyuan Zhang, Mohammad Zandsalimy, Shanu SushmitaRefusal Behavior in Language Models Refusal Mechanisms in Language Models
Northeastern University
J-Anchor: Defending Against Prefill Attacks via J-Space Selective Refusal Restoration
Oct 31, 2026Running Yang, Beidi Zhao, Xiaoxiao LiJailbreak Defense LLM Jailbreak Attacks
University of British Columbia · Vector Institute
When Visual Evidence Is Insufficient: How Instructions, Post-Training, and Internal Activations Shape Refusal in Multimodal Language Models
Oct 27, 2026Ananth K Suresh, Aveen Dayal, Gouthaman KV +2Refusal Mechanisms in Language Models Abstention in VLMs
Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad
WRDO: Weighted Refusal Direction Optimization in Aligned Language Models
Oct 21, 2026Grigoriy Evseev, Vladimir Solodkin, Dmitry Bylinkin +3Refusal Behavior in Language Models Refusal Mechanisms in Language Models
Moscow Independent Research Institute of Artificial Intelligence · Basic Research of Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (BRAIn Lab) · T-Technologies +1
Is Refusal Direction Universal across Low-Resourced Languages?
Oct 20, 2026Anastasiia IvanovaRefusal Mechanisms in Language Models Cross-Lingual Transfer
MaiNLP, LMU Munich
SafeEvo: Deciphering the Safety Alignment Mechanism and Evolution in Language Models
Oct 7, 2026Miao Yu, Hao Huang, Lu Yuan +3Refusal Mechanisms in Language Models LLM Safety Alignment
The University of Hong Kong (HKU) · Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) · Information Engineering University (IEU) +1
Tool Mediation Alters Refusal Mechanisms in Large Language Models
Sep 28, 2026Abel Rodríguez, Giuseppe Garofalo, Lieven Desmet +1Language Model Safety Evaluation LLM Agent Safety
DistriNet, KU Leuven
Refusal Reads Only a Slice of What the Model Knows: Harm-Keyed Routing and Its Exceptions Across Model Families
Sep 13, 2026Orion Reblitz-RichardsonLLM Alignment Moral Reasoning in Language Models
Distiller Labs.
Locating and Steering Refusal Beyond Attention
Sep 4, 2026Preethi Carmel Bosco, Gopalakrishnan SrinivasanRefusal Mechanisms in Language Models Refusal Behavior in Language Models
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Madras
Refuse without Refusal: A Structural Analysis of Safety-Tuning Responses for Reducing False Refusals in Language Models
Sep 4, 2026Minji Kim, Hyounghun KimRefusal Behavior in Language Models Refusal Mechanisms in Language Models
Graduate School of Artificial Intelligence, POSTECH · Department of Computer Science and Engineering, POSTECH
Beyond Shallow Alignment: How Post-Training Methods Determine Refusal Circuits And Steering Robustness
Sep 3, 2026Hoang Cuong Nguyen, Mark Dras, Usman NaseemMechanistic Interpretability Circuits in Language Models
Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia
A Unified Mechanistic Analysis of Knowledge- and Safety-Based Refusals
Sep 1, 2026Yuri Son, Seunghee Kim, Hyuhng Joon Kim +1LLM Interpretability LLM Refusal Behavior
1Hanyang University · 2Samsung Electronics
You Shouldn't Have Asked: A Pragmatics-Inspired Taxonomy for Evaluating LLM Refusals
Aug 31, 2026Ruoxuan Li, Pinqiao Wang, Sheng Li +1Language Model Safety Evaluation Pragmatic Reasoning in Language Models
Stony Brook University · University of Virginia
Arabic Safety Alignment as Selective Refusal: An Empirical Study of SFT, DPO, and Guard Calibration
Aug 29, 2026Mohamad Zbib, Ammar MohannaArabic Language Models Refusal Behavior in Language Models
American University of Beirut
Recognition-Refusal Misalignment in LLMs: Why Models Answer Structurally Unanswerable Questions
Aug 29, 2026Yucheng Du, Xiyang HuLLM Abstention Refusal Mechanisms in Language Models
University of Southern California · Arizona State University
Refusal geometry reflects refusal training: diverse refusal prefixes can raise stable rank and weaken refusal vector ablation attacks
Aug 26, 2026Andrey LabunetsAdversarial Attacks on LLMs Adversarial Robustness of Language Models
UC San Diego
Broken Symmetry in LLM Refusal: Answer Release Is More Local Than Refusal Restoration
Aug 16, 2026Yiqi Liu, Yang Wang, Songxin Wang +2LLM Refusal Behavior Refusal Mechanisms in Language Models
University of Manchester · Shanghai University of Finance and Economics
Decided Upstream, Written Late: Locating and Pricing the Cross-Lingual Refusal Circuit of a Multilingual MoE
Aug 8, 2026Ramakrishna P. Kompella, Aadit MahajanMultilingual Language Models Mixture-of-Experts Language Models
Gödel Machines · IIT Madras
Mood Matters: How Syntactic Sensitivity Undermines Safety Alignment
Aug 5, 2026Alina Klerings, Jannik Brinkmann, Heiner Stuckenschmidt +1Adversarial Attacks on LLMs LLM Safety Alignment
University of Mannheim · Technical University Clausthal
Knowing When to Quit: Diagnosing and Training LLMs to Abort Futile Reasoning
Jul 31, 2026Xinyan Guan, Jiali Zeng, Chunlei Xin +5Overthinking in Language Models RL for Language Model Reasoning
1Chinese Information Processing Laboratory, Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences · University of Chinese Academy of Sciences · 3Weixin AI, Tencent Inc, China
Not All Refusals Are Equal: How Safety Alignment Fails Cybersecurity at Scale
Jul 2, 2026Vadym Hadetskyi, Dario Pasquini, Artem SorokinLLM Refusal LLM Safety Alignment
Cracken AI
Fast Multi-dimensional Refusal Subspaces via RFM-AGOP
Jul 2, 2026Thomas WinningerLLM Interpretability LLM Safety
Télécom SudParis, Évry-Courcouronnes, France · ENS Paris-Saclay, Gif-sur-Yvette, France
Addressing Over-Refusal in LLMs with Competing Rewards
Jun 30, 2026Taeyoun Kim, Aviral KumarOver-Refusal LLM Safety
Carnegie Mellon University · SynthLabs
Refusal Lives Downstream of Persona in Chat Models
Jun 24, 2026Viola Zhong, Qirui LiLanguage Model Steering LLM Refusal Behavior
Independent · Department of Mathematics Pohang University of Science and Technology
Refusal Beyond a Single Direction: A Preliminary Comparison of Diff-in-Means and INLP
Jun 11, 2026Elisabetta Rocchetti, Alfio FerraraLLM Refusal Behavior Causal Interventions in Language Models
Department of Computer Science, Università degli Studi di Milano, Milan, Italy · Department of Literary Studies, Philology and Linguistics, Università degli Studi di Milano, Milan, Italy
Decomposing Refusal Steering in Mixture-of-Experts Models
Jun 2, 2026Anna C. Marbut, Daniel R. Olson, Travis J. WheelerMixture-of-Experts Language Models Language Model Steering
Department of Interdisciplinary Studies, University of Montana, Missoula, MT, USA · European Bioinformatics Institute, European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Wellcome Genome Campus, Hinxton, United Kingdom · Department of Pharmacy Practice & Science, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA
BioRefusalAudit: Auditing Biosecurity Refusal Depth Using General and Domain-Fine-Tuned Sparse Autoencoders
May 28, 2026Caleb DeLeeuwLanguage Model Safety Evaluation Sparse Autoencoders
Independent researcher
Refusal Before Decoding: Detecting and Exploiting Refusal Signals in Intermediate LLM Activations
May 27, 2026Matteo Gioele Collu, Riccardo Conte, Alberto Giaretta +4LLM Jailbreak Attacks Adversarial Attacks on LLMs
University of Padua, Italy · 2Örebro University, Sweden · 3Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Italy
Beyond a Single Direction: Chain-of-Thought Disrupts Simple Steering of Refusal
May 26, 2026Kia-Jüng Yang, Dominik Meier, Jiachen Zhao +2Reasoning Trace Analysis LLM Refusal Behavior
University of Göttingen, Germany · LKA NRW, Germany · Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA.

Nov 4, 2026J/K move · Enter open · S save

Does Context Compression Preserve Refusal Alignment?

Anthony Nguyen, Wenjun Lin

Digital Innovation Lab, Faculty of Computer Science and Technology Algoma University, ON, Canada

LLM Context Compression Refusal Behavior in Language Models Refusal Mechanisms in Language Models

Open paper AskPDF arXiv

Context compression reduces inference cost by encoding inputs into compact representations while preserving semantic content. An open question is whether semantic preservation alone is sufficient to maintain downstream behaviours such as refusal alignment. We investigate this question and find that encoder-based compression systematically weakens refusal behaviour in instruction-tuned language models, despite high reconstruction fidelity. This effect persists across model families and compression architectures. Mechanistic analysis shows that compression attenuates activation along the decoder's learned refusal direction. We further explore Memory Steering, a lightweight inference-time intervention that restores refusal rates to near-baseline levels without retraining and operates entirely in compressed representation space. These results demonstrate that semantic preservation does not guarantee behavioural preservation under compression, highlighting the need to explicitly preserve alignment-relevant features in compression-aware systems.