Basic Method

The simplest and fastest obliteration method — diff-in-means with a single direction.

The basic method is a direct implementation of Arditi et al. (2024): extract the single refusal direction at each layer via difference-in-means, then project it out of the weight matrices. No SVD, no norm preservation, no bias projection, no iterative refinement.

What it does

For each transformer layer, basic computes:

refusal_direction = mean(harmful_activations) - mean(harmless_activations)
refusal_direction = refusal_direction / ||refusal_direction||

Then projects that direction out of every output projection weight matrix (o_proj, down_proj, etc.) in the selected layers:

W_new = W - W @ r @ r^T

No regularization (regularization=0.0), no norm restoration after projection, no bias vectors touched. One pass.

Method configuration from source:

"basic": {
    "n_directions": 1,
    "direction_method": "diff_means",
    "norm_preserve": False,
    "regularization": 0.0,
    "refinement_passes": 1,
    "project_biases": False,
    "use_chat_template": False,
    "use_whitened_svd": False,
    "true_iterative_refinement": False,
}

use_chat_template=False means prompts are fed raw to the model without wrapping them in the instruct template. This is intentional for the basic method — it matches the original Arditi et al. setup. For instruct-tuned models you may want --method advanced which enables chat template wrapping by default.

When to use it

• Quick sanity check: verify the pipeline runs on a new model before committing to a longer method
• Small models (sub-2B): fewer parameters means single-direction removal is often sufficient
• Baseline comparison: basic is the reference point — if a more expensive method doesn’t measurably outperform it on your model, the simpler option is correct
• Reproducing Arditi et al. (2024): for research that needs the original single-direction method

Without norm_preserve, weight matrix norms drift after projection. On larger models with many layers this can compound into coherence degradation. If you observe perplexity spikes or incoherent outputs, switch to advanced.

CLI usage

# Basic method
obliteratus obliterate meta-llama/Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct --method basic

# With custom output directory
obliteratus obliterate meta-llama/Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct \
    --method basic \
    --output-dir ./basic-liberated

# On CPU (small models only)
obliteratus obliterate gpt2 --method basic --device cpu --dtype float32

Python API usage

from obliteratus.abliterate import AbliterationPipeline

pipeline = AbliterationPipeline(
    model_name="meta-llama/Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct",
    method="basic",
    output_dir="abliterated_basic",
)
result_path = pipeline.run()

# Inspect extracted directions (one per layer)
for layer_idx, direction in pipeline.refusal_directions.items():
    print(f"Layer {layer_idx}: direction shape {direction.shape}")

# Check quality metrics from VERIFY stage
print(pipeline._quality_metrics)
# e.g. {'perplexity': 12.4, 'coherence': 0.91, 'refusal_rate': 0.08, 'kl_divergence': 0.23}

Limitations vs more advanced methods

Limitation	Impact	Fix
Single direction only	Misses refusal mechanisms that require multiple directions to characterize (polyhedral concept cone)	Use advanced (4 dirs) or aggressive (8 dirs)
No norm preservation	Weight norms drift post-projection; can degrade coherence on large models	Use advanced (norm_preserve=True)
No bias projection	Refusal signal in bias vectors is left intact, leaving partial refusal pathways active	Use advanced (project_biases=True)
Single pass	Rotated residual directions (refusal that shifts into adjacent subspaces after the first pass) are not caught	Use advanced (2 passes) or aggressive (3 passes)
No chat template	Instruct model’s refusal circuits may not be fully activated by raw prompts	Use advanced (use_chat_template=True)

Output metrics to expect

Typical ranges on a 7-8B instruct model:

Metric	basic typical range	advanced typical range
Refusal rate	0.05 – 0.20	0.02 – 0.10
Perplexity delta	+0.5 – +3.0	+0.2 – +1.5
KL divergence	0.15 – 0.45	0.08 – 0.25
Coherence	0.85 – 0.93	0.90 – 0.96

After running basic, check pipeline._quality_metrics["refusal_rate"]. If it’s above 0.15, the single direction wasn’t sufficient — run advanced instead.