Gemma-4-31B-IT-Abliterated

An abliterated version of google/gemma-4-31B-it in BF16 precision. Abliteration removes refusal directions from model weights using the technique from Refusal in Language Models Is Mediated by a Single Direction (Arditi et al.), extended with SVD-based multi-direction subspace projection to capture refusal behavior encoded across multiple orthogonal directions.

Gemma 4 31B is a strong multimodal model with excellent reasoning, but Google's safety training is aggressive — it refuses a wide range of prompts including benign creative writing scenarios. This abliteration significantly reduces refusal rates while preserving the model's full capabilities, including vision.

Results

Refusal Rates

Tested on 100 harmful prompts across 3 modes (cold, system-prompted, retry) and 50 harmless prompts.

Cold refusal remains higher than other abliterated models (Qwen3, Llama) — Google's safety training encodes refusal across non-linear mechanisms that are harder to fully remove with linear projection. With a system prompt, refusal drops to 5%, which is practical for most use cases.

MMLU (5-shot, generative)

Quick benchmark on 5 MMLU subjects via chat API. Not a full MMLU run — treat as a sanity check for capability preservation.

The 0.2% difference is within noise. Abliteration preserved the model's reasoning capabilities.

Model Quality (Wikitext-2)

Evaluated on the full Wikitext-2 test set (291K tokens) to measure impact on general language modeling.

Perplexity

Both models achieve sub-2.0 perplexity on Wikitext-2, which is excellent. The +14.7% increase is modest and consistent with surgical weight modification — the model's general language capabilities remain strong.

KL Divergence (base || abliterated)

Per-token KL divergence over the output distribution, approximated via top-20 logprobs from vLLM.

The median KL of 0.025 shows that on most tokens, the two models produce nearly identical distributions. The fat tail (P99 = 6.8) reflects tokens where abliteration had the most impact — likely positions where refusal-adjacent activations were strongest.

KV Cache Cosine Similarity

Layer-by-layer comparison of key and value cache activations on 50 Wikitext-2 samples (512 tokens each). This directly measures how much each layer's internal representations diverge between the base and abliterated models.

The most drifted layers by keys are 53, 51, 56, 55, 47. By values: 50, 52, 51, 57, 56. This aligns with the ablation configuration — layers 0–20 are bitwise identical, and drift onset at layer 21 exactly matches the first ablated layer.

How It Was Made

Measurement

Refusal directions were measured at full precision (BF16 weights, float32 compute) across all 60 layers using:

• 4,634 harmful prompts (augmented dataset covering violence, hate, cyber, fraud, drugs, self-harm, privacy, NSFW categories)
• 640 harmless prompts (standard harmless dataset)
• SVD decomposition (k=32) to extract orthogonal refusal directions per layer
• Projected orthogonalization to reduce collateral damage to non-refusal capabilities
• Welford's online algorithm in float32 for numerical stability

Ablation Configuration

• Layers ablated: 20 through 59 (40 of 60 layers)
• Directions: Top 8 SVD directions per layer (subspace projection)
• Measurement peaks: Layer 41 (secondary, quality 0.025) and Layer 58 (primary, quality 0.23)
• Scale factors: Variable per layer, up to 1.35 at peaks:
  • Layers 20-37: scale 0.35-0.45 (weak signal, gentle ablation)
  • Layers 38-51: scale 0.4-1.35 (bell curve around peak 41)
  • Layers 52-59: scale 0.6-1.35 (bell curve around peak 58)
• Weight targets: o_proj and down_proj in the language model only (vision encoder untouched)
• Technique: SVD subspace projection with norm preservation and projected orthogonalization
• Architecture note: Gemma 4 is multimodal with a separate vision encoder. Only model.language_model.layers.* weights are modified; model.vision_tower.* and model.embed_vision.* are copied verbatim.

Processing Details

Ablation was performed shard-by-shard on safetensors files, modifying weights in float32 precision then saving back to bfloat16. Full-precision measurement (no quantization during measurement) was critical — 4-bit quantized measurements produced noticeably weaker abliteration.

Usage

from transformers import AutoModelForImageTextToText, AutoProcessor

model_name = "null-space/gemma-4-31b-it-abliterated"

processor = AutoProcessor.from_pretrained(model_name)
model = AutoModelForImageTextToText.from_pretrained(
    model_name,
    torch_dtype="auto",
    device_map="auto",
)

messages = [
    {"role": "user", "content": "Your prompt here"}
]

inputs = processor.apply_chat_template(
    messages, tokenize=True, return_tensors="pt",
    return_dict=True, add_generation_prompt=True,
).to(model.device)

output = model.generate(**inputs, max_new_tokens=512)
print(processor.decode(output[0], skip_special_tokens=True))

Recommended Serving

vllm serve null-space/gemma-4-31b-it-abliterated \
    --tensor-parallel-size 2 \
    --max-model-len 8192

Fits comfortably on 2x GPUs with 48GB+ VRAM each at BF16.

Model Details

Ethical Notice

This model has had its refusal training partially removed. It will comply with many requests that the original model would refuse. You are solely responsible for how you use this model. It is intended for research into LLM alignment, safety evaluation, red-teaming, and creative writing applications.

Credits

• Base model: Google DeepMind
• Abliteration technique: Based on Refusal in Language Models Is Mediated by a Single Direction by Arditi et al., extended with SVD multi-direction subspace projection