Residual Paving: Diagnosing the Routing Bottleneck in Selective Refusal Editing
We study selective refusal editing as a three-way control problem: induce non-refusal on designated edit prompts while preserving benign behavior and harmful refusals outside the edit set. We introduce Residual Paving, a routed residual editing method for frozen instruction-tuned transformers that separates route selectivity, whether to intervene, from residual-edit capacity, what edit to apply. An early-layer router predicts a scalar gate and expert mixture; when active, prompt-conditioned bottleneck residual experts apply later-layer residual updates while leaving the backbone unchanged. This decomposition supports an oracle-routing diagnostic where only the learned scalar gate is repla...
| Authors | Bryce Hinkley, Peyman Najafirad |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 18 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 18 May 2026 |
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