Geek Labs

Sep 9, 2026 · Artificial Intelligence

Heretic: Automated Model Surgery Removes Refusal Without Damaging Capabilities

This article explains how Heretic automates directional ablation to permanently remove refusal behavior from language models by editing model weights, contrasting it with jailbreaks and steering vectors, and details its use of Optuna optimization with KL divergence to preserve model capabilities, situating it within a broader taxonomy of model modification techniques.