Refusal Lives Downstream of Persona in Chat Models

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence [Submitted on 24 Jun 2026] Refusal Lives Downstream of Persona in Chat Models Viola Zhong, Qirui Li Linear directions in activation space have been identified for both refusal and persona traits in instruction-tuned chat models, but the two have been studied as separate mechanisms. We show they interact: a compliant persona gates refusal. In Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct and Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct, we extract a compliant model-persona direction and a refusal direction and intervene on both. Compliant persona steering suppresses refusal -- in Llama, the refusal rate falls from 97% to 2%. Reintroducing the refusal direction partially restores refusal at late layers but not at early ones. Projecting out the persona direction in a late-layer window restores it to baseline; projecting out a random direction does not. Refusal is therefore gated at the late-layer expression stage, downstream of where it is computed. Treating refusal as a single isolated direction misses its dependence on persona. Comments: Accepted to the ICML 2026 Mechanistic Interpretability workshop Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) Cite as: arXiv:2606.26161 [cs.AI]   (or arXiv:2606.26161v1 [cs.AI] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.26161 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Viola Zhong [view email] [v1] Wed, 24 Jun 2026 04:25:59 UTC (244 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.AI < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-06 Change to browse by: cs References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)