Abliteration Mitigation via Refusal Aliases
arXiv:2608.18093v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Abliteration, the removal of refusal capabilities from large language models by projecting weight matrices orthogonal to an extracted refusal direction, has emerged as a prominent safety concern through its ability to bypass post-training alignment using only a small set of contrastive prompts. We find that existing defenses commonly overlook the cause of abliteration; that is, how easily the refusal direction can be extracted. To hinder this process, we introduce a weight-editing method that obscures the refusal signal by applying rank-$k$ updates to residual stream writer matrices while replacing refusal-inducing activations with random aliases and correcting downstream reader matrices to preserve the model's original behavior. On Llama-3-8B, AMRA improves post-abliteration refusal scores by $2.16$ points over the undefended baseline with less than $0.5$ percentage points of MMLU degradation. On Gemma-2-9B, it improves the post-abliteration refusal by $14.70$ points over the baseline while keeping harmful output rates similar to the baseline, albeit at a greater utility cost.
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[Submitted on 7 Jun 2026]
Title:Abliteration Mitigation via Refusal Aliases
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Abstract:Abliteration, the removal of refusal capabilities from large language models by projecting weight matrices orthogonal to an extracted refusal direction, has emerged as a prominent safety concern through its ability to bypass post-training alignment using only a small set of contrastive prompts. We find that existing defenses commonly overlook the cause of abliteration; that is, how easily the refusal direction can be extracted. To hinder this process, we introduce a weight-editing method that obscures the refusal signal by applying rank-$k$ updates to residual stream writer matrices while replacing refusal-inducing activations with random aliases and correcting downstream reader matrices to preserve the model's original behavior. On Llama-3-8B, AMRA improves post-abliteration refusal scores by $2.16$ points over the undefended baseline with less than $0.5$ percentage points of MMLU degradation. On Gemma-2-9B, it improves the post-abliteration refusal by $14.70$ points over the baseline while keeping harmful output rates similar to the baseline, albeit at a greater utility cost.
Subjects:
Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Cryptography and Security (cs.CR)
Cite as: arXiv:2608.18093 [cs.CL]
(or arXiv:2608.18093v1 [cs.CL] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.18093
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite
Submission history
From: Nathan Truong [view email] [v1] Sun, 7 Jun 2026 02:50:38 UTC (224 KB)
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