This is the original description of abliteration and it's quite approachable and interesting to read: Refusal in Language Models Is Mediated by a Single Direction (https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.11717). Warning: changes to your world view caused by seeing "HarmBench" used to maximise expected harm instead of minimising it may be irreversible.
There's an empirical observation that models often have a single direction in their activation space for "hmm no I shouldn't do this". It forms naturally during pre-training, and is then surfaced during post-training to make the model refuse to engage in certain behaviour.
With a little bit of linear algebra you can zap that direction from the model's activations, and it stops refusing to do things. You can also do the opposite: magnify that direction, and the model refuses to do anything at all.
There's an empirical observation that models often have a single direction in their activation space for "hmm no I shouldn't do this". It forms naturally during pre-training, and is then surfaced during post-training to make the model refuse to engage in certain behaviour.
With a little bit of linear algebra you can zap that direction from the model's activations, and it stops refusing to do things. You can also do the opposite: magnify that direction, and the model refuses to do anything at all.