New ablation operator. (apostate)

Today I added a new operator to apostate. This new operator is a contrastive co-vector edit E = I − R Dᵀ. Removing the refusal direction outright disturbs benign behavior, while naively preserving all harmless variance along it leaves the refusal that is entangled with general behavior intact. Instead D = R − W, where the predictor W is fit to reproduce the harmless variance along R while being explicitly suppressed on harmful prompts — W = (AᵀA + γ·CᵀC + λI)⁻¹Aᵀb with A the harmless and C the harmful activations (both orthagonalized to R). The edit thus keeps the harmless-specific component and removes the component shared with refusal, driving refusal down while keeping the change to harmless behavior (KL) small. This holds even on architectures with residual/embedding scaling multipliers (e.g. Granite), where mean-preserving oblique ablation under-ablates.

When testing on granite-3.3-8b, I got very promising results:

(Sorry for such a formal post, I'm not very good at simple explanations including math)

Links:

Apostate

Model shown in post

I wish reddit supported latex