2025
The Geometry of Refusal in Large Language Models: Concept Cones and Representational Independence
Tom Wollschläger, Jannes Elstner, Simon Geisler, Vincent Cohen-Addad, Stephan Günnemann, Johannes Gasteiger
ICML 2025poster
The safety alignment of large language models (LLMs) can be circumvented through adversarially crafted inputs, yet the mechanisms by which these attacks bypass safety barriers remain poorly understood. Prior work suggests that a *single* refusal direction in the model's activation space determines w…