EmoRSS: Mitigating Emotion-Induced Over-Refusal in Large Language Models
Emotional expression can influence the safety decisions of large language models (LLMs), offering a potential avenue for improving safety alignment. Existing studies have mainly focused on how emotional expressions facilitate attacks under harmful requests, while overlooking their effects on benign requests. We find that emotional expression can also systematically increase refusal tendencies on benign requests, leading to unnecessary over-refusal. Based on this observation, we propose emotion-guided refusal subspace steering (EmoRSS), an activation-steering method that mitigates emotion-induced over-refusal while preserving refusal behaviour on harmful requests. Specifically, we first id...
| Authors | Shuyi Miao, Yaojin Ma, Chenhang Cui et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 4 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 4 October 2026 |
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