Refusal Lives Downstream of Persona in Chat Models

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.