{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/nothing-in-excess-mitigating-the-exaggerated","title":"SCANS: Mitigating the Exaggerated Safety for LLMs via Safety-Conscious Activation Steering","arxiv_id":"2408.11491","date":"2024-08-21","proceeding":null,"authors":["Zouying Cao","Yifei Yang","Hai Zhao"],"abstract":"Safety alignment is indispensable for Large Language Models (LLMs) to defend threats from malicious instructions. However, recent researches reveal safety-aligned LLMs prone to reject benign queries due to the exaggerated safety issue, limiting their helpfulness. In this paper, we propose a Safety-Conscious Activation Steering (SCANS) method to mitigate the exaggerated safety concerns in aligned LLMs. First, SCANS extracts the refusal steering vectors within the activation space and utilizes vocabulary projection to anchor some specific safety-critical layers which influence model refusal behavior. Second, by tracking the hidden state transition, SCANS identifies the steering direction and steers the model behavior accordingly, achieving a balance between exaggerated safety and adequate safety. Experiments show that SCANS achieves new state-of-the-art performance on XSTest and OKTest benchmarks, without impairing their defense capability against harmful queries and maintaining almost unchanged model capability.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.11491v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2408.11491v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"nothing-in-excess-mitigating-the-exaggerated","repo_url":"https://github.com/zouyingcao/SCANS","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"safety-alignment","task_name":"Safety Alignment"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2408.11491","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2408.11491"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/zouyingcao/SCANS","reach":null}],"summary":{"ran_honours":2},"by_repo_kind":{"official":{"samples":2,"ran":2,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":2,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"22296fb22622de6f","entry":"tokenize_llama_base","repo":"zouyingcao/SCANS","repo_kind":"official","path":"utils/modeling_utils.py","file_url":"https://github.com/zouyingcao/SCANS/blob/HEAD/utils/modeling_utils.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran_honours","verification_level":1,"contract_check":"HONOURS","metamorphic_tier":"well_formed","behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"NONE","inline_ok":false,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"22296fb22622de6f"}},{"code_sha256_prefix":"9328f2bbacff0396","entry":"tokenize_vicuna_v1_5","repo":"zouyingcao/SCANS","repo_kind":"official","path":"utils/modeling_utils.py","file_url":"https://github.com/zouyingcao/SCANS/blob/HEAD/utils/modeling_utils.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran_honours","verification_level":1,"contract_check":"HONOURS","metamorphic_tier":"well_formed","behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"NONE","inline_ok":false,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"9328f2bbacff0396"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}