From Trait Vectors to Circuits: Tracing Refusal and Sycophancy Through Language Models

Abstract:A direction in activation space that changes safety-relevant behavior when steered is not necessarily one the model uses to produce that behavior on its own. We therefore ask whether steering acts through the computation of the unmodified model or through a different set of components, studying two traits whose directions have been extracted and validated in prior work: refusal and sycophancy in Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct. For each, we use the trait vector to split the computation into a reconstruction circuit before the vector and a transmission circuit after it. We then test whether restoring the coordinate returns behavior removed by ablation. For refusal, both circuits are compact and faithful, restoring the coordinate alone recovers almost all of the refusal signal lost to ablation, and a circuit built around the vector matches the faithfulness of a direct input-to-output circuit at roughly half the edges. For sycophancy, transmission is compact, but reconstruction is broader and only partially faithful. Circuits that transmit a steering intervention are therefore not automatically the circuits that produce the behavior, and we report the counterfactual, target, and behavioral test for every circuit accordingly.

Computation and Language (cs.CL); Machine Learning (cs.LG)

arXiv:2609.22224 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2609.22224v1 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.22224 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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