From Refusal Geometry to Safety Geometry: Harmfulness--Refusal Coupling under Dynamic Adversarial Fine-Tuning (opens in new tab)

Safety alignment requires language models to refuse harmful requests without losing the ability to answer benign ones. Existing robustness evaluations, however, do not reveal whether a model has learned to recognize harmfulness, to activate a refusal policy, or to couple these two processes. We study this question with a dual safety-geometry protocol that measures harmfulness carriers, refusal carriers, and their coupling across aligned instruct...