Risk and Refusal: Mechanisms of LLM Responses to Suicidal Ideation
Refusal is a common safety mechanism in large language models (LLMs), yet in contexts of suicidal ideation (SI), refusing to engage can itself constitute a safety failure.
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Key points
- We evaluate how eight instruction-tuned LLMs respond to SI and self-harm disclosures across three datasets, varying whether models are informed that a disclosure expresses SI and whether they receive a clinician-developed response protocol, and complement this with mechanistic analyses in six open-weight models.
- Our results reveal a nuanced relationship between refusal and response-level risk.
- At baseline, elevated risk in model responses is driven primarily by inattention to the disclosure, alongside refusal to engage.
- Mechanistic analyses suggest that models may refuse SI disclosures through the same direction that mediates their refusals of harmful requests.
Sources (1)
- [1]Risk and Refusal: Mechanisms of LLM Responses to Suicidal IdeationarXiv (AI, ML, NLP, CV, robotics, multi-agent) · Oct 15, 10:34 PM
Refusal is a common safety mechanism in large language models (LLMs), yet in contexts of suicidal ideation (SI), refusing to engage can itself constitute a safety failure.
We evaluate how eight instruction-tuned LLMs respond to SI and self-harm disclosures across three datasets, varying whether models are informed that a disclosure expresses SI and whether they receive a clinician-developed response protocol, and complement this with mechanistic analyses in six open-weight models.
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