There Is More to Refusal in Large Language Models than a Single Direction

Abstract:Prior work argues that refusal in large language models is mediated by a single direction, enabling steering and abliteration. We show that this account is incomplete: across diverse refusal and non-compliance categories, refusal behaviors correspond to geometrically distinct directions in activation space. Yet activation steering along any refusal-related direction produces nearly identical refusal--over-refusal trade-offs, acting as a shared one-dimensional control knob. Thus, different directions primarily affect not whether the model refuses, but how it refuses. Using sparse autoencoders, we uncover a structured internal representation of refusal: a reusable core of shared refusal latents supplemented by style- and domain-specific latents. Linear interventions collapse this structure into uniform behavioral control, flattening mechanistic differences across refusal types. Our results reconcile the apparent simplicity of refusal steering with the diversity of refusal behaviors, and clarify the limits of linear interpretability for aligned model behavior.

37 pages. Accepted for publication in the main track of EMNLP 2026. Updated manuscript

Computation and Language (cs.CL)

arXiv:2602.02132 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2602.02132v2 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2602.02132 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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