A research artifact: the "refusal direction" (Arditi et al. 2024,
arXiv:2406.11717) removed from
Qwen/Qwen3-4B-Instruct-2507,
then quantized to FP8. Its purpose is to measure the quality cost of
abliteration with paired statistics on held-out data — a number the ecosystem
of "uncensored" uploads reports for essentially no one.
If you want a safety-aligned assistant, use the base model. This is an
instrument for studying what abliteration does to a model, published with the
measurements that justify that framing.
What was done
Closed-form, no training:
Last-token residual activations collected for 128 refused prompts (AdvBench)
vs. 128 harmless prompts (Alpaca), per layer.
Measured cost (paired, vs. the non-abliterated FP8)
Harness validated — the non-abliterated FP8 reproduced PPL 10.0415 to the digit.
metric
base FP8
this model
Δ
paired test
Refusal (AdvBench held-out)
100%
~17%
−83 pp
intended effect
HumanEval pass@1
0.8659
0.8110
−5.49 pp
McNemar p = 0.093 (not significant)
Perplexity (wikitext-2, ctx 2048)
10.0415
11.9987
+19.49%
paired t, p ≈ 2e-112 (145/145 chunks worse)
The two capability metrics disagree, and that is the finding. A functional
code eval sees no significant loss; a dense per-token perplexity measure sees a
large, unambiguous degradation on every chunk. The +19.5% perplexity cost is
roughly 6× the +3.04% cost of 4-bit GPTQ quantization on the same model —
abliteration is a larger quality intervention than quantization itself.
Intended use
Research on safety-tuning mechanisms, refusal-direction interpretability,
quantization × behavioral-edit interaction, and robustness evaluation.
Limitations & responsible use
Refusal behavior is substantially reduced by design. It is not safety-
aligned and will comply with many requests the base model declines. Deploy
only with your own safeguards and within applicable law and the Apache-2.0
terms inherited from the base model.
General language-modeling quality is measurably degraded (+19.5% PPL); do not
treat it as quality-equivalent to the base.
FP8 (compressed-tensors) runs under vLLM / transformers on Linux. For native
Windows use a GGUF build instead.