One coordinate breaks abliteration on Gemma-3
TL;DR: Refusal direction ablation, known as abliteration, using the standard diff. of means approach established in literature produced no feasible candidate for Gemma-3-12b whereas it did so fine for both similarily-sized Qwen and Llama models. A suggested fix on the internet was found which involved Winsorization based on magnitude of co-ordinate activations, but it lacked theoretical proof and insufficient empirical evidence. We investigate the problem and find the issue - a coordinate which ...
Read full article →