Jailbreaking the Matrix: Nullspace Steering for Controlled Model Subversion
Large language models remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks -- inputs designed to bypass safety mechanisms and elicit harmful responses -- despite advances in alignment and instruction tuning. We propose Head-Masked Nullspace Steering (HMNS), a circuit-level intervention that (i) identifies attention heads most causally responsible for a model's default behavior, (ii) suppresses their write paths via targeted column masking, and (iii) injects a perturbation constrained to the orthogonal complement of the muted subspace. HMNS operates in a closed-loop detection-intervention cycle, re-identifying causal heads and reapplying interventions across multiple decoding attempts. Across multiple j...
| Authors | Vishal Pramanik, Maisha Maliha, Susmit Jha et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CR |
| Published | 11 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 11 April 2026 |
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