Causal Localization of the Refusal Direction in Audio Language Models
A large audio language model (LALM) attaches a speech front end to a text language model (LM) that is already safety-aligned. When such a model refuses a harmful spoken request, is the refusal carried by the front end, or inherited from the text LM? We test this with causal interventions. At each model's audio-to-LM interface and at tested LM residual layers, we fit a direction separating harmful from benign prompts, ablate its component, and measure the resulting change in the model's first-token refusal margin. Four of the five models are evaluated under held-out category shift. Across five LALMs spanning three backbone families, with three models passing a baseline safety gate, the lar...
| Authors | Leonardo Haw-Yang Foo, Hung-yi Lee |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.MM |
| Published | 6 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 6 September 2026 |
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