Safety & Alignment
Refusal
Model behaviour of declining a request that violates its safety policy.
Definition
Refusal training teaches a model to recognise unsafe requests and respond with explanations or alternatives instead. Tuning the threshold is delicate: over-refusal harms helpfulness, under-refusal exposes risk. Refusal benchmarks (XSTest, MaliciousInstruct) probe this balance.
Common use cases
- Safety filters
- Compliance
- Risk assessment