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Jul 30

Abliteration Is Not a Scalpel: Off-Target Effects of Refusal Removal on Decision Disposition Across Model Families

Abliteration - deleting a model's refusal direction from its weights - is the standard recipe behind popular "uncensored" open-weight models. We show the surgery is not clean. As a disposition probe we use 21,600 decisions under uncertainty - weekly up/down calls on 60 Warsaw Stock Exchange equities over 18 weeks, replayed through a frozen pipeline so the decision-layer model is the only variable. The task elicits no refusals at all, so any between-arm delta is pure side effect. Holding provenance constant (official BF16 checkpoints, a single abliteration author, an identical serving stack, one byte-identical frozen prompt), we compare base and abliterated arms of two Mixture-of-Experts families, Gemma-4-26B-A4B-it and Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507. Three effects replicate across both families (weeks-clustered bootstrap CIs excluding zero): abliterated models are systematically more optimistic (+12.2 pp Gemma, +7.4 pp Qwen; the confirmed preregistered endpoint), justify themselves at greater length, and use fewer explicit uncertainty words in forced self-critiques (both exploratory). A fourth effect reverses sign: the same operation makes Gemma-abliterated less confident and Qwen-abliterated more (family CIs non-overlapping) - one weight surgery, opposite shifts in expressed confidence. Capability covariates rule out instruction-following degradation as the driver, and no arm shows economic skill: the apparent edge of abliterated arms is regime beta, not alpha. Our provenance audit also caught two independent contamination channels - a mismatched-quantizer pilot pair and a stale community chat template that silently mangled the rendered prompt - suggesting toolchain artifacts are the rule in studies of community-modified checkpoints. Whoever deploys an "uncensored" model as an agent is deploying a measurably different decision-maker, not the base model minus refusals.

  • 1 authors
·
Jul 18

Wake Vision: A Large-scale, Diverse Dataset and Benchmark Suite for TinyML Person Detection

Machine learning applications on extremely low-power devices, commonly referred to as tiny machine learning (TinyML), promises a smarter and more connected world. However, the advancement of current TinyML research is hindered by the limited size and quality of pertinent datasets. To address this challenge, we introduce Wake Vision, a large-scale, diverse dataset tailored for person detection -- the canonical task for TinyML visual sensing. Wake Vision comprises over 6 million images, which is a hundredfold increase compared to the previous standard, and has undergone thorough quality filtering. Using Wake Vision for training results in a 2.41\% increase in accuracy compared to the established benchmark. Alongside the dataset, we provide a collection of five detailed benchmark sets that assess model performance on specific segments of the test data, such as varying lighting conditions, distances from the camera, and demographic characteristics of subjects. These novel fine-grained benchmarks facilitate the evaluation of model quality in challenging real-world scenarios that are often ignored when focusing solely on overall accuracy. Through an evaluation of a MobileNetV2 TinyML model on the benchmarks, we show that the input resolution plays a more crucial role than the model width in detecting distant subjects and that the impact of quantization on model robustness is minimal, thanks to the dataset quality. These findings underscore the importance of a detailed evaluation to identify essential factors for model development. The dataset, benchmark suite, code, and models are publicly available under the CC-BY 4.0 license, enabling their use for commercial use cases.

  • 8 authors
·
May 1, 2024