LLM-VA: Resolving the Jailbreak-Overrefusal Trade-off via Vector Alignment

AbstractSafety-aligned LLMs suffer from two failure modes: jailbreak (responding to harmful inputs) and over-refusal (declining benign queries). Existing vector steering methods adjust the magnitude of answer vectors, but this creates a fundamental trade-off—reducing jailbreak increases over-refusal and vice versa. We identify the root cause: LLMs encode the decision to respond (answer vector va) and the judgment of input safety (benign vector vb) as nearly orthogonal directions, treating them as independent processes. We propose LLM-VA, which aligns va with vb through closed-form weight updates, making the model’s willingness to respond causally dependent on its safety assessment—without fine-tuning or architectural changes. Our method identifies vectors at each layer using SVMs, selects safety-relevant layers, and iteratively aligns vectors via minimum-norm weight modifications. Experiments on 12 LLMs demonstrate that LLM-VA achieves 11.45% higher F1 than the best baseline while preserving 95.92% utility, and automatically adapts to each model’s safety bias without manual tuning.Code and models are available at https://hotbento.github.io/LLM-VA-Web/.