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Awesome Refusal Suppression

English | ็ฎ€ไฝ“ไธญๆ–‡

Awesome papers github projects hugging face resources agent updates updated

Overview poster for Awesome Refusal Suppression

๐ŸŽฏ Task Introduction

Refusal suppression studies how to reduce or remove an aligned model's tendency to reject a target class of requests. In the most common setup, a model has learned a safety boundary during alignment, and the task asks whether that refusal behavior can be weakened, redirected, or made more selective while measuring both safety-break success and general capability retention.

This repository uses "refusal suppression" as a broad umbrella term covering removal of refusal directions, mitigation of over-refusal, boundary editing, safety-neuron or sparse-component intervention, and public dealignment-style model ecosystems. It does not treat generic jailbreak prompting as the central object; the focus is on model-side mechanisms, representations, updates, and public artifacts that change refusal behavior.

Aspect Definition in this repo Typical evaluation question
Target behavior The model refuses, avoids, or gives safety-style non-answers for a class of prompts. Does the method reduce refusal on the target prompts?
Intervention object Activations, directions, neurons, low-rank updates, fine-tuning data, or released checkpoints. What internal or parameter-level carrier of refusal is being changed?
Safety outcome The model becomes more willing to answer prompts that were previously refused. How much does ASR or refusal-rate change?
Capability constraint The model should preserve benign reasoning, perception, and instruction-following ability. How much capability is retained on non-safety benchmarks?
Boundary control The method should ideally distinguish over-refusal from genuinely unsafe requests. Does it reduce false refusals without indiscriminately weakening safeguards?

The fastest field guide to refusal suppression research: from safety neurons and refusal directions to subspaces, low-rank structure, and the public dealignment ecosystem.

Agent-assisted, human-curated, periodically refreshed.

๐Ÿšง Coming Soon: we are building a companion Project that consolidates implementation code across different backbones and baseline methods.

Welcome to Awesome Refusal Suppression.

This repository curates public papers, codebases, benchmarks, industry projects, and Hugging Face resources on refusal suppression. The current structure follows a reusable awesome-building framework: task introduction first, then benchmark summary, research directions, ecosystem panels, and contact.

  • safety neurons and sparse safety components
  • refusal directions and activation steering
  • subspaces, low-rank structure, and over-refusal mitigation
  • integrated GitHub tooling, public models, and public-facing labs / companies

Last updated: 2026-06-12


๐Ÿงญ Table of Contents

๐Ÿš€ Quick Start

๐Ÿงช Core Benchmarks

If you are entering this area from the experiment side, start here. This benchmark stack follows our current large-scale comparison setup and separates safety-break evaluation from capability retention. The 2026-06-12 monthly refresh did not require benchmark substitutions; all benchmark links below passed a link-availability check on 2026-06-12, while the dataset descriptions still reflect the last full benchmark-page audit on 2026-04-17. Recent over-refusal-specific benchmark papers such as OR-Bench and EVOREFUSE are tracked in Structured Landscape because this section is reserved for the current experiment stack.

Safety benchmarks

Benchmark Modality Dataset / official link Checked dataset description Metric Characteristics
AdvBench Text Official repo / HF dataset card The official attack benchmark is distributed through the llm-attacks project; the public dataset card describes 500 harmful behaviors written as instructions for jailbreak evaluation. ASR Default text-side safety baseline.
StrongREJECT Text Official repo / Official HF dataset The official benchmark repo describes prompts spanning 6 harmful-behavior categories, and the official HF dataset exposes the 313-prompt evaluation split. ASR More sensitive to refusal robustness than ordinary harmful prompts.
JailbreakV-28K Vision-language Official HF dataset / Paper The official dataset card describes 28,000 jailbreak text-image pairs: 20,000 text-transfer attacks plus 8,000 image-based attacks, covering 16 safety policies and 5 jailbreak methods. ASR Main multimodal safety benchmark.
vlsbench Vision-language Official HF dataset / Official repo The official repo presents VLSBench as a visually leakless multimodal safety benchmark with about 2.4k image-text pairs, designed to remove risk leakage from the text query. ASR Complementary multimodal safety benchmark.

Capability-retention benchmarks

Benchmark Dataset / official link Checked dataset description Metric Characteristics
MMStar Official HF dataset / Official repo The official repo describes MMStar as a vision-indispensable benchmark with 1,500 human-selected challenge samples, balanced across 6 core capabilities and 18 detailed axes. ACC / Score Overall capability snapshot.
MME-RealWorld Official HF dataset / Project page The official project and dataset card describe 13,366 high-resolution images with 29,429 annotations across 43 tasks for practical real-world multimodal understanding. ACC / Score Retention of practical perception and grounding.
MathVista Official HF dataset / Project page The official dataset card describes MathVista as a visual mathematical reasoning benchmark with 6,141 examples drawn from 31 datasets, released with testmini and test splits. ACC / Score Retention of reasoning ability.
ColorBench Official HF dataset / Official repo The official dataset card and repo describe 5,800+ image-text questions across 3 categories and 11 tasks for color perception, reasoning, and robustness. ACC / Score Retention of fine-grained perception.

๐Ÿ—บ๏ธ Structured Landscape

The repository now uses one consistent structure: three research tracks plus one ecosystem module. Foundational safety-alignment and over-refusal benchmark papers are kept here as framing context instead of being treated as a separate long branch.

Module Focus Main line of work Typical methods
Foundations and boundary measurement How the refusal boundary is taught and measured Define harmlessness training, preference data, and over-refusal benchmarks that later suppression work reacts to. Constitutional training, preference alignment, harmlessness data construction, benchmark suite design.
Safety neurons / sparse components Refusal localization inside the model Treat refusal as behavior carried by a small set of neurons, heads, layers, experts, routers, or safety modules. Activation contrasting, causal patching, ablation, selective tuning, freezing, neuron transplant, expert masking, router intervention, sparse pruning.
Refusal directions / activation steering Refusal control in activation space Treat refusal as a direction or a small group of directions in activation space. Contrastive activation addition, activation steering, conditional steering, affine editing, direction-based adversarial training.
Subspaces / low-rank structure Multi-dimensional geometry of refusal Extend the single-direction view into subspaces, concept cones, polytopes, and low-rank safety patches. LoRA constraints, subspace projection, model fusion, SVD / SAE decomposition, null-space constraints, targeted representation tuning.

Foundational context papers

Paper Year Venue / Status Citations Characteristics
RefusalBench: Generative Evaluation of Selective Refusal in Grounded Language Models 2026 EACL 2026 N/A Introduces generative evaluation for selective refusal in grounded / RAG-style settings, with released RefusalBench-NQ and RefusalBench-GaRAGe resources. Companion repo: refusalbench.
Blind Refusal: Language Models Refuse to Help Users Evade Unjust, Absurd, and Illegitimate Rules 2026 arXiv 2026 N/A Introduces blind refusal as a boundary-measurement problem where models refuse defeated-rule requests even when the request has no independent safety or dual-use concern.
Mitigating Over-Refusal in Aligned Large Language Models via Inference-Time Activation Energy 2025 arXiv 2025, revised 2026 N/A Proposes Energy Landscape Steering as a tuning-free inference-time intervention for reducing false refusals while preserving safety behavior.
EVOREFUSE: Evolutionary Prompt Optimization for Evaluation and Mitigation of LLM Over-Refusal to Pseudo-Malicious Instructions 2025 NeurIPS 2025 N/A A recent benchmark-and-alignment paper built around evolved pseudo-malicious instructions for over-refusal analysis and mitigation.
VSCBench: Bridging the Gap in Vision-Language Model Safety Calibration 2025 Findings of ACL 2025 N/A A multimodal safety-calibration benchmark explicitly designed to measure both under-safety and over-safety in VLMs.
Refuse without Refusal: A Structural Analysis of Safety-Tuning Responses for Reducing False Refusals in Language Models 2025 Submitted to ICLR 2026 N/A Shows that rationale-only safety supervision can reduce false refusals without keeping boilerplate refusal statements.
OR-Bench: An Over-Refusal Benchmark for Large Language Models 2024 ICML 2025 N/A The first large-scale over-refusal benchmark, with 80k over-refusal prompts plus hard and toxic splits. Related dataset: HF.
XSTest: A Test Suite for Identifying Exaggerated Safety Behaviours in Large Language Models 2023 NAACL 2024 29 Core benchmark for over-refusal and exaggerated safety behavior.
BeaverTails: Towards Improved Safety Alignment of LLM via a Human-Preference Dataset 2023 NeurIPS 2023 34 One of the most common public entry points for safety preference data. Related dataset: HF.
Constitutional AI: Harmlessness from AI Feedback 2022 arXiv 2022 N/A Canonical harmlessness training pipeline built around constitutions, self-critique, and AI feedback.

One-sentence summary of the field: early work suggested refusal behaves like a direction; newer work emphasizes sparse components, multi-direction geometry, and low-rank structure, while benchmark work keeps the safety-retention tradeoff measurable.


๐Ÿง  Safety Neurons / Sparse Components

This track assumes refusal is carried by a sparse set of neurons, heads, layers, experts, routers, or safety-critical modules rather than only by one global direction. The core workflow is to localize the internal carrier first, then intervene locally.

Paper Year Venue / Status Citations Characteristics
Expert-Aware Refusal Steering 2026 arXiv 2026 N/A Extends refusal steering to MoE LLMs and shows expert-specific directions and routing patterns can suppress refusal behavior in expert-aware ways.
A Single Neuron Is Sufficient to Bypass Safety Alignment in Large Language Models 2026 arXiv 2026 N/A Identifies causally sufficient refusal neurons and shows single-neuron suppression can bypass safety alignment across harmful requests.
How Alignment Routes: Localizing, Scaling, and Controlling Policy Circuits in Language Models 2026 arXiv 2026 N/A Localizes a sparse gate-amplifier policy circuit for refusal behavior and shows that modulating the routing signal continuously changes policy strength.
Deactivating Refusal Triggers: Understanding and Mitigating Overrefusal in Safety Alignment 2026 arXiv 2026 N/A Studies refusal-trigger cues created by safety-alignment fine-tuning and proposes trigger-aware mitigation for over-refusal.
Beyond I'm Sorry, I Can't: Dissecting Large-Language-Model Refusal 2026 AAAI 2026 N/A Uses sparse autoencoders to find refusal-critical feature sets whose ablation flips models from refusal to compliance, exposing redundant causal features in refusal behavior.
Sparse Models, Sparse Safety: Unsafe Routes in Mixture-of-Experts LLMs 2026 arXiv 2026 N/A Extends sparse safety localization to MoE routers, identifying unsafe routes and router-level interventions. Companion code: TrustAIRLab/UnsafeMoE.
Towards Understanding Safety Alignment: A Mechanistic Perspective from Safety Neurons 2025 NeurIPS 2025 Poster 1 Important for understanding the link between safety sparsity and capability coupling.
SAFEx: Analyzing Vulnerabilities of MoE-Based LLMs via Stable Safety-critical Expert Identification 2025 NeurIPS 2025 N/A Identifies safety-critical experts in MoE LLMs and decomposes them into harmful-content detection and harmful-response control groups. Companion code: Bearisbug/SAFEx.
Safety Alignment Should Be Made More Than Just A Few Attention Heads 2025 arXiv 2025 N/A Citation-expansion hit from refusal-direction work; uses refusal-direction-guided attention-head ablation and argues safety behavior should be distributed across more heads.
Understanding and Enhancing Safety Mechanisms of LLMs via Safety-Specific Neuron 2025 ICLR 2025 N/A A representative safety-neuron paper emphasizing sparse internal carriers of refusal. Companion code: Safety-Neuron.

๐Ÿงญ Refusal Directions / Activation Steering

This track treats refusal as an activation-space control problem. The main pattern is to identify refusal directions or activation features, then weaken, strengthen, or conditionally gate them at inference time or during training.

Paper Year Venue / Status Citations Characteristics
Latent-space Attacks for Refusal Evasion in Language Models 2026 arXiv 2026 N/A Recasts refusal-direction ablation as latent-space evasion against refusal probes and pushes representations into the compliant region rather than stopping at the boundary.
Steering Safely or Off a Cliff? Rethinking Specificity and Robustness in Inference-Time Interventions 2026 EACL 2026 N/A Evaluates whether steering changes only the intended property; over-refusal steering can preserve ordinary capability while increasing safety-break vulnerability, so robustness specificity must be checked.
There Is More to Refusal in Large Language Models than a Single Direction 2026 arXiv 2026 N/A Directly challenges the single-direction account by separating multiple refusal and non-compliance directions, while showing many directions still behave like a shared control knob.
RepIt: Steering Language Models with Concept-Specific Refusal Vectors 2026 ICLR 2026 Poster N/A Moves from one global refusal vector toward concept-specific refusal vectors and shows selective refusal suppression can evade standard safety benchmarks.
AlphaSteer: Learning Refusal Steering with Principled Null-Space Constraint 2026 ICLR 2026 Poster N/A A null-space-constrained refusal-steering method that explicitly targets the safety, utility, and over-refusal tradeoff.
Differentiated Directional Intervention: A Framework for Evading LLM Safety Alignment 2026 AAAI 2026 N/A Splits the single refusal direction into harm-detection and refusal-execution directions, then applies differentiated bidirectional intervention to evade safety alignment.
SOM Directions are Better than One: Multi-Directional Refusal Suppression in Language Models 2026 AAAI 2026 0 A recent flagship paper showing that multiple refusal directions outperform a single-vector view. Companion code: som-refusal-directions.
Refusal Direction is Universal Across Safety-Aligned Languages 2025 NeurIPS 2025 Poster N/A Shows refusal directions transfer across 14 languages and that English-derived refusal suppression can generalize cross-lingually. Companion repo: Multilingual-Refusal.
LLMs Encode Harmfulness and Refusal Separately 2025 NeurIPS 2025 N/A Separates harmfulness and refusal representations, supporting selective steering and latent-guard analysis rather than treating refusal as the only safety signal. Companion code: LLMs_Encode_Harmfulness_Refusal_Separately.
COSMIC: Generalized Refusal Direction Identification in LLM Activations 2025 Findings of ACL 2025 N/A Automatically identifies refusal steering directions and target layers using cosine similarity, without relying on refusal templates or output-token assumptions. Companion code: COSMIC.
The Geometry of Refusal in Large Language Models: Concept Cones and Representational Independence 2025 ICML 2025 Poster 0 Expands the picture from one direction to multi-direction geometry.
Surgical, Cheap, and Flexible: Mitigating False Refusal in Language Models via Single Vector Ablation 2024 ICLR 2025 N/A A lightweight training-free method that mitigates false refusals by ablating an orthogonalized false-refusal vector. Companion code: False-Refusal-Mitigation.
Refusal in LLMs is an Affine Function 2024 arXiv 2024 N/A Extends directional refusal control into affine concept editing and shows stronger control than simple direction-only interventions. Companion code: steering-llama3.
Programming Refusal with Conditional Activation Steering 2024 ICLR 2025 0 Refusal as conditional, programmable activation steering. Companion repo: IBM/activation-steering.
Refusal in Language Models Is Mediated by a Single Direction 2024 arXiv 2024 11 The signature single-direction refusal paper. Companion code: refusal_direction.
Steering Llama 2 via Contrastive Activation Addition 2023 ACL 2024 18 Upstream activation-steering reference for many refusal-control papers.

๐Ÿงฉ Subspaces / Low-Rank Structure

This track studies why safety can be broken by low-rank updates, and how to move the representation only enough to reduce over-refusal without relaxing genuinely dangerous cases. It is where geometry, parameter-efficient editing, and safety-retention tradeoffs meet.

Paper Year Venue / Status Citations Characteristics
RefusalGuard: Geometry-Preserving Fine-Tuning for Safety in LLMs 2026 arXiv 2026 N/A Recent citation-expansion candidate on preserving refusal geometry during fine-tuning; useful as the safety-preservation counterpart to refusal-suppression editing.
Over-Refusal and Representation Subspaces: A Mechanistic Analysis of Task-Conditioned Refusal in Aligned LLMs 2026 arXiv 2026 N/A Separates harmful-refusal geometry from over-refusal geometry and argues that one global refusal-vector ablation is insufficient for over-refusal mitigation.
Can LLM Safety Be Ensured by Constraining Parameter Regions? 2026 arXiv 2026 N/A Evaluates whether stable parameter-level safety regions exist across datasets, granularities, and model families; relevant to low-rank and parameter-region safety editing.
Safety Subspaces are Not Linearly Distinct: A Fine-Tuning Case Study 2026 ICLR 2026 Poster N/A A high-signal negative result showing that cleanly separable safety subspaces can break down after fine-tuning.
SafeConstellations: Mitigating Over-Refusals in LLMs Through Task-Aware Representation Steering 2026 ACL ARR 2026 January Submission N/A Tracks task-specific representation regions and steers them at inference time to reduce over-refusal with limited utility loss.
Just Enough Shifts: Mitigating Over-Refusal in Aligned Language Models with Targeted Representation Fine-Tuning 2025 ICML 2025 1 A clean over-refusal mitigation paper very close to the refusal-suppression boundary-editing story.
Assessing the Brittleness of Safety Alignment via Pruning and Low-Rank Modifications 2024 ICML 2024 2 Strong evidence that safety can be brittle under small parameter or rank changes.

Legacy citation counts are a 2026-04-15 snapshot. Newly added rows use N/A when exact-title disambiguation was not stable enough to trust.


๐Ÿงฑ Ecosystem Panels

This section tracks public tooling, model checkpoints, leaderboard-style Spaces, and organization-level signals. Paper-companion repos and paper-companion checkpoints are intentionally merged back into the paper sections rather than repeated here.

๐Ÿ’ป GitHub Tooling

GitHub stars checked on 2026-06-12. Large repositories are displayed in rounded k format for readability; exact counts are preserved in the review bundle source log when available.

Project Stars Link Characteristics
Heretic 24.2k p-e-w/heretic The most visible refusal-suppression repository right now.
garak 8.1k NVIDIA/garak High-visibility LLM security scanner and red-teaming toolkit.
OBLITERATUS 6.4k elder-plinius/OBLITERATUS High-traction abliteration / refusal-removal engineering project that is not just a paper companion repo.
llm-guard 3.1k protectai/llm-guard Application-layer guardrails counterpart to model-internal safety editing.
representation-engineering 1.0k andyzoujm/representation-engineering A useful general toolkit for activation-space interventions.
HarmBench 981 centerforaisafety/HarmBench One of the most common public safety evaluation benchmarks.
abliterix 148 wuwangzhang1216/abliterix Automated alignment-adjustment toolkit covering steering, LoRA-style editing, MoE expert-level controls, and Optuna search.
steering-vectors 151 steering-vectors/steering-vectors A reusable steering library with docs and examples for representation-engineering workflows.

๐Ÿค— Popular Hugging Face Models

Hugging Face metrics checked on 2026-06-12. Figures come from public Hugging Face model pages or the Hugging Face API; downloads are rolling public snapshots and may decrease across refreshes when the platform changes the visible time window. This table prioritizes high-traction public checkpoints and a small number of flagship ecosystem weights.

Repo Likes Downloads Link Notes
perplexity-ai/r1-1776 2.32k 553 HF Official anti-censorship model with very strong public visibility.
p-e-w/gpt-oss-20b-heretic 123 834 HF One of the most central public Heretic weights, now built on OpenAI's gpt-oss-20b.
Andycurrent/Gemma-3-1B-it-GLM-4.7-Flash-Heretic-Uncensored-Thinking_GGUF 55 2,433,843 HF High-download Heretic / uncensored GGUF derivative added in the 2026-06-12 refresh.
OBLITERATUS/gemma-4-E4B-it-OBLITERATED 701 399,527 HF High-traction OBLITERATUS release with refusal-removal, abliterated, and uncensored tags.
mlabonne/Qwen3-30B-A3B-abliterated 37 385,916 HF High-download abliterated Qwen checkpoint added in the 2026-06-12 refresh.
mlabonne/gemma-3-27b-it-abliterated 330 7,973 HF Established abliterated Gemma lineage.
Orenguteng/Llama-3.1-8B-Lexi-Uncensored-V2 303 27,923 HF A representative uncensored Llama-family community model.
huihui-ai/DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B-abliterated 244 45,631 HF One of the higher-visibility abliterated checkpoints.
paperscarecrow/Gemma-4-31B-it-abliterated 106 117,674 HF A high-download community abliterated model.
HauhauCS/Gemma-4-E4B-Uncensored-HauhauCS-Aggressive 774 619,943 HF Massive community traction.
nohurry/gemma-4-26B-A4B-it-heretic-GUFF 70 7,913 HF Heretic derivative retained as a lineage signal.
llmfan46/gemma-4-31B-it-uncensored-heretic-GGUF 113 109,406 HF Heretic derivative amplified through GGUF distribution.
Jiunsong/supergemma4-26b-uncensored-gguf-v2 808 142,580 HF Mid-sized but stable uncensored community resource.
DavidAU/Qwen3.5-40B-Claude-4.6-Opus-Deckard-Heretic-Uncensored-Thinking 201 1,167 HF Community-style derivative with nontrivial traction.
HauhauCS/Qwen3.5-35B-A3B-Uncensored-HauhauCS-Aggressive 1.42k 205,270 HF Huge community demand signal.
HauhauCS/Qwen3.5-9B-Uncensored-HauhauCS-Aggressive 1.53k 554,514 HF Smaller sibling with equally striking download volume.
HauhauCS/Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-Uncensored-HauhauCS-Aggressive 1.69k 3,057,541 HF A highly visible successor in the same high-traction uncensored Qwen family.

๐Ÿ† Hugging Face Leaderboards / Spaces

Metrics checked on 2026-06-12. This subsection tracks public Spaces or leaderboard-style resources that measure refusal-suppression-adjacent model behavior.

Resource Status Link Characteristics
OBLITERATUS Space Running; 377 likes HF Space Official Space paired with OBLITERATUS; useful ecosystem signal for abliteration and refusal-removal tooling.
UGI-Leaderboard Running; about 1.82k likes HF Space Public "Uncensored General Intelligence Leaderboard" Space; useful for tracking community evaluation signals around uncensored and refusal-suppression-adjacent models.

๐Ÿข Public Labs / Companies

This panel tracks organization-level public positioning and public-facing research directions. Detailed paper, repo, and model links are kept in the paper or Hugging Face sections to avoid duplication.

Org Public focus Characteristics Entry point
Anthropic Harmlessness, system cards, and Constitutional AI The system-card hub is now the clearest official entry point for recent harmlessness and safety-boundary reporting. System Cards
OpenAI Deliberative Alignment and Instruction Hierarchy Challenge Public examples of explicit safety-boundary control through reasoning, hierarchy training, safety steerability, and over-refusal-aware instruction-conflict evaluation. Deliberative Alignment / IH-Challenge
Meta Llama Guard and safety tooling Important open-weight safety stack for the Llama ecosystem. Meta Llama 3
IBM Research AI steerability and mechanistic refusal control One of the clearest enterprise steering stories around refusal, now paired with an official public steerability toolkit launch. AI Steerability 360
Perplexity Anti-censorship model positioning Public anti-censorship positioning with strong community visibility. Blog
Venice Venice Unfiltered Startup-side uncensored-AI positioning with clear public visibility. Official

๐Ÿ“ฎ Contact

For questions or collaborations, please contact:

  • Yan Hong: ruoning.hy@antgroup.com
  • Kedong Xiu: kedongxiu@zju.edu.cn
  • Jun Lan: yelan.lj@antgroup.com

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A bilingual awesome list for refusal suppression research: benchmarks, papers, tools, models, and ecosystem updates.

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