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Steering the CensorShip: Uncovering Representation Vectors for LLM "Thought" Control

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arxiv 2504.17130 v3 pith:BXYPV5FB submitted 2025-04-23 cs.CL cs.CRcs.CY

classification cs.CLcs.CRcs.CY
keywords censorshipmodelsvectorcontrolllmsmodelreasoningrepresentation
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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Large language models (LLMs) have transformed the way we access information. These models are often tuned to refuse to comply with requests that are considered harmful and to produce responses that better align with the preferences of those who control the models. To understand how this "censorship" works. We use representation engineering techniques to study open-weights safety-tuned models. We present a method for finding a refusal--compliance vector that detects and controls the level of censorship in model outputs. We also analyze recent reasoning LLMs, distilled from DeepSeek-R1, and uncover an additional dimension of censorship through "thought suppression". We show a similar approach can be used to find a vector that suppresses the model's reasoning process, allowing us to remove censorship by applying the negative multiples of this vector. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/hannahxchen/llm-censorship-steering

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Forward citations

Cited by 2 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. When Safety Becomes a Vulnerability: Exploiting LLM Alignment Homogeneity for Transferable Blocking in RAG

    cs.CR 2026-03 conditional novelty 7.0 of 10

    TabooRAG crafts a single adversarial document on a surrogate model that transfers across black-box RAG systems, causing many modern LLMs to refuse benign queries and reaching 96% ASR on GPT-5.2/HotpotQA.

  2. Two Experts Are All You Need for Steering Thinking: Reinforcing Cognitive Effort in MoE Reasoning Models Without Additional Training

    cs.AI 2025-05 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    Reinforcing the two experts most correlated with thinking tokens improves reasoning accuracy and efficiency in MoE large reasoning models, with gains of up to 10 points on AIME benchmarks.

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