From Trait Vectors to Circuits: Tracing Refusal and Sycophancy Through Language Models
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Computer Science > Computation and Language
arXiv:2609.22224 (cs)
[Submitted on 2 Sep 2026]
Title:From Trait Vectors to Circuits: Tracing Refusal and Sycophancy Through Language Models
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Abstract:A direction in activation space that changes safety-relevant behavior when steered is not necessarily one the model uses to produce that behavior on its own. We therefore ask whether steering acts through the computation of the unmodified model or through a different set of components, studying two traits whose directions have been extracted and validated in prior work: refusal and sycophancy in Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct. For each, we use the trait vector to split the computation into a reconstruction circuit before the vector and a transmission circuit after it. We then test whether restoring the coordinate returns behavior removed by ablation. For refusal, both circuits are compact and faithful, restoring the coordinate alone recovers almost all of the refusal signal lost to ablation, and a circuit built around the vector matches the faithfulness of a direct input-to-output circuit at roughly half the edges. For sycophancy, transmission is compact, but reconstruction is broader and only partially faithful. Circuits that transmit a steering intervention are therefore not automatically the circuits that produce the behavior, and we report the counterfactual, target, and behavioral test for every circuit accordingly.
| Subjects: | Computation and Language (cs.CL); Machine Learning (cs.LG) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2609.22224 [cs.CL] |
| (or arXiv:2609.22224v1 [cs.CL] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.22224
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
|
Submission history
From: Oscar Miró López-Feliu [view email][v1] Wed, 2 Sep 2026 21:16:33 UTC (27 KB)
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View a PDF of the paper titled From Trait Vectors to Circuits: Tracing Refusal and Sycophancy Through Language Models, by Oscar Mir\'o L\'opez-Feliu and Maya Ozbayoglu
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