[2606.04160] Expert-Aware Refusal Steering
[Submitted on 2 Jun 2026]
Title:Expert-Aware Refusal Steering
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Abstract:Safety alignment in instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs) depends on a model's ability to reliably refuse to respond to harmful or disallowed requests. Recent work has shown that a steering vector can be applied to a dense LLM during inference to effectively suppress refusal behavior, inducing response to harmful requests. We extend this refusal steering method to three open-source Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) LLMs and find that steering performance is uninhibited by the complex routing patterns inherent to the MoE architecture. We then propose two expert-aware refusal steering methods that leverage refusal-specific expert routing patterns and expert-specific steering directions to suppress normal refusal behavior. We find that refusal behavior can be effectively steered based on the output of a single expert. Our results show that refusal signals captured by steering methods differ from expert routing behavior, suggesting a substantial role for attention in MoE refusal behavior.
Comments: Under review for COLM 2026
Subjects:
Computation and Language (cs.CL); Machine Learning (cs.LG)
Cite as: arXiv:2606.04160 [cs.CL]
(or arXiv:2606.04160v1 [cs.CL] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.04160
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
Submission history
From: Anna Marbut [view email] [v1] Tue, 2 Jun 2026 19:23:46 UTC (237 KB)
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