What problem does it solve?
OBLITERATUS removes refusal/guardrail behaviors from open-weight LLMs by surgically projecting out the internal refusal directions, avoiding the cost of retraining.
Core Features & Use Cases
- Refusal-direction identification: Detects and extracts refusal mechanisms using diff-in-means, SVD, and LEACE direction extraction, plus mechanistic analysis modules when configured.
- Weight projection (no retraining): Applies norm-preserving projections (or more aggressive variants) to ablate refusal behavior while attempting to preserve overall reasoning quality.
- Method selection by model type: Chooses safer defaults for most models (advanced), and more specialized methods for MoE models (nuclear) and reasoning models (surgical).
- Verification and evaluation: Benchmarks refusal rate, perplexity change, and KL divergence to assess coherence damage and residual refusals.
- Workflow options: Runs single-model abliteration, interactive guided setup, full analysis-before-abliteration, tournament comparisons, and batch YAML-driven experiments.
Quick Start
Run the default abliteration method by telling the agent to invoke the obliteratus CLI to ablate the target model with --method advanced and write outputs to your chosen directory.