Refusal Steering: Fine-grained Control over LLM Refusal Behaviour for Sensitive Topics
Iker García-Ferrero, David Montero, Roman Orus · Dec 18, 2025
Citations: 0
Red Team Automatic Metrics General
- We replace fragile pattern-based refusal detection with an LLM-as-a-judge that assigns refusal confidence scores and we propose a ridge-regularized variant to compute steering vectors that better isolate the refusal--compliance direction.
- On Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Thinking, our method removes the refusal behaviour of the model around politically sensitive topics while maintaining safety on JailbreakBench and near-baseline performance on general benchmarks.