HeadEdit: Calibrating Language Model Behavior Through the Frozen Unembedding Matrix
Alignment does not eliminate behavioral errors in language models. Models may still refuse benign requests, call unnecessary tools, or yield to false user claims. Current methods mitigate such errors as a computation problem, and rarely explore if the desired behavior is already encoded in the model's representation. Motivated by the observation that behavior-relevant information remains linearly decodable from the final hidden state even when the resulting logits produce the undesired behavior, we introduce HeadEdit, a gradient-free method that calibrates model behavior through the unembedding matrix. HeadEdit extracts a low-rank behavioral subspace from paired completions and uses each ...
| Authors | Zirui He, Haiyan Zhao, Jingyu Hu et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 1 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 1 October 2026 |
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