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

Faaiz Joad; Majd Hawasly; Sabri Boughorbel; Nadir Durrani; Husrev Taha Sencar

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arXiv · 2602.02132

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

Faaiz Joad·Majd Hawasly·Sabri Boughorbel·Nadir Durrani·Husrev Taha Sencar

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Abstract

Prior work argues that refusal in large language models is mediated by a single activation-space direction, enabling effective steering and ablation. We show that this account is incomplete. Across eleven categories of refusal and non-compliance, including safety, incomplete or unsupported requests, anthropomorphization, and over-refusal, we find that these refusal behaviors correspond to geometrically distinct directions in activation space. Yet despite this diversity, linear steering along any refusal-related direction produces nearly identical refusal to over-refusal trade-offs, acting as a shared one-dimensional control knob. The primary effect of different directions is not whether the model refuses, but how it refuses.

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Faaiz Joad, Majd Hawasly, Sabri Boughorbel, Nadir Durrani, Husrev Taha Sencar. 2026-02-02. There Is More to Refusal in Large Language Models than a Single Direction. https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.02132

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