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Summary of Refusal in Llms Is An Affine Function, by Thomas Marshall et al.


Refusal in LLMs is an Affine Function

by Thomas Marshall, Adam Scherlis, Nora Belrose

First submitted to arxiv on: 13 Nov 2024

Categories

  • Main: Machine Learning (cs.LG)
  • Secondary: Computation and Language (cs.CL)

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GrooveSquid.com Paper Summaries

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Summary difficulty Written by Summary
High Paper authors High Difficulty Summary
Read the original abstract here
Medium GrooveSquid.com (original content) Medium Difficulty Summary
The proposed affine concept editing (ACE) approach allows for direct steering of language models’ behavior by intervening in activations. By decomposing model activation vectors into affine terms, ACE combines subspace projection and activation addition to reliably control refusal responses across prompt types. The method is evaluated using LLM-based scoring on a collection of harmful and harmless prompts, demonstrating more precise control over model behavior than existing methods.
Low GrooveSquid.com (original content) Low Difficulty Summary
Language models can be controlled by directly intervening in their activations, which is important for steering their behavior. This paper proposes an approach called affine concept editing (ACE) that does this. ACE works by breaking down the model’s activation vectors into smaller parts and then manipulating these parts to change the model’s behavior. The researchers tested ACE on several different models and found that it was able to reliably control their refusal responses.

Keywords

» Artificial intelligence  » Prompt