On the Steering Dimensionality of Refusal in Language Models
Existing activation steering methods often assume that a high-level concept can be mediated by a single steering direction. To support this, two complementary interventions should be achieved: additive steering should induce the target behavior, while directional ablation should suppress it. Yet behaviors may occupy richer activation geometries beyond a single direction, and semantically similar behaviors may be represented by distinct directions. In this work, we study how many directions can reliably control two different types of refusal behaviors: refusal triggered by the safety alignment and refusal in general contexts. Given the limited expressive capability of a single steering vec...
| Authors | Han Wang, Erik Miehling, Dennis Wei et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 3 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 3 October 2026 |
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