Over-Refusal and Representation Subspaces: A Mechanistic Analysis of Task-Conditioned Refusal in Aligned LLMs
Aligned language models that are trained to refuse harmful requests also exhibit over-refusal: they decline safe instructions that seemingly resemble harmful instructions. A natural approach is to ablate the global refusal direction, steering the hidden-state vectors away or towards the harmful-refusal examples, but this corrects over-refusal only incidentally while disrupting the broader refusal mechanism. In this work, we analyse the representational geometry of both refusal types to understand why this happens. We show that harmful-refusal directions are task-agnostic and can be captured by a single global vector, whereas over-refusal directions are task-dependent: they reside within t...
| Authors | Utsav Maskey, Mark Dras, Usman Naseem |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 29 March 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 1 September 2026 |
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