Bocheng Chen
2026
Deactivating Refusal Triggers: Understanding and Mitigating Overrefusal in Safety Alignment
Zhiyu Xue | Zimo Qi | Guangliang Liu | Bocheng Chen | Ramtin Pedarsani
Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Trustworthy NLP (TrustNLP 2026)
Zhiyu Xue | Zimo Qi | Guangliang Liu | Bocheng Chen | Ramtin Pedarsani
Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Trustworthy NLP (TrustNLP 2026)
Safety alignment aims to ensure that large language models (LLMs) refuse harmful requests by post-training on harmful queries paired with refusal answers.Although safety alignment is widely adopted in industry, the overrefusal problem where aligned LLMs also reject benign queries after safety alignment post-training, remains insufficiently studied. Such an issue degrades the usability of safety alignment in real-world applications.In this paper, we examine how overrefusal arises under safety alignment, and propose a mitigation strategy inspired by our findings. We define refusal triggers as linguistic cues in the training data that elicit refusal responses, safety alignment encourages LLMs to associate refusal triggers within a training sample with refusal responses, leading aligned LLMs to refuse harmful queries.However, the refusal triggers include not only harmful linguistic cues but also non-harmful cues, therefore causing overrefusal to benign queries.Building on this mechanistic analysis, we propose a method that explicitly considers refusal triggers in the safety alignment fine-tuning.Empirical results demonstrate that our approach achieves a more favorable trade-off between defense against jailbreak attacks and responsiveness to benign queries, outperforming prior methods. Warning: this paper contains harmful and biased sentences.