Haoqi Sun
Author directory2026
Fine-Grained Selective Refusal: Steering LLM Safety via Wasserstein-Informed Flow Matching
Zhiyi Liu | Haohua Du | Haoqi Sun | Haisheng Tan
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Zhiyi Liu | Haohua Du | Haoqi Sun | Haisheng Tan
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Activation steering offers a lightweight approach to LLM safety, yet existing methods relying on static, linear perturbations often struggle with complex boundaries, leading to severe safety-utility trade-offs such as over-refusal. To address this, we introduce WassSteer. First, we propose a Safety Routing Mechanism that achieves context-aware sparse control by selectively intervening only on unsafe activations. Second, we reformulate steering as a transport problem on the Wasserstein Representation Manifold. Utilizing Flow Matching, WassSteer learns a non-linear velocity field to transport harmful activations toward safe regions along Wasserstein Geodesics, effectively neutralizing toxicity while maximally preserving semantic content. Experiments across Llama-3, Gemma-2, and Qwen-2.5 demonstrate that WassSteer significantly outperforms baselines against diverse jailbreaks while maintaining high performance on general benchmarks, effectively reshaping the safety-utility Pareto frontier.