Many people here loves abliterated models, Heretic fine-tunes, and uncensored checkpoints. But aren't we overlooking a pretty serious supply-chain security problem? We're downloading modified weights from third parties, often without any way to verify what actually changed. And LLM backdoors aren't hypothetical. ProjectDiscovery recently demonstrated that a cheap LoRA fine-tune could introduce a hidden trigger that makes a coding agent execute malicious commands, while the model behaves perfectly normally otherwise. (see this if you want read more) I'm not suggesting all Heretic models are malicious. The point is that every time we download modified weights, we're trusting whoever modified them. If you want a uncensored model a quite cool that people not considering as deserve is vector steering. It allows you to still respond to atrocious things, without rejection and also offers advantages such as: Keep the original model weights completely untouched. (abliteration make lose more capacity in general than steering) Compute your own refusal-suppression vectors. Enable, disable, or adjust steering dynamically. Avoid downloading potentially compromised third-party checkpoints. A steering vector is fundamentally different from a fine-tuned model. It doesn't offer the same capacity for hiding complex, trigger-dependent malicious behaviors. A steering vector is fundamentally different from a fine-tuned model. It doesn't offer the same capacity for hiding complex, trigger-dependent malicious behaviors. It's not an absolute security guarantee, but it removes an entire layer of unnecessary trust. You can take your coding agent and link to him the original paper an implementation like DwarfStar and edit your engine (llama, strata or what you prefer) for add it. I made it for my engine Quarkstar with Qwen3.8-27B References: ProjectDiscovery — How abliterated models can get you pwned: https://projectdiscovery.io/research/how-abliterated-models-can-get-you-pwned Original paper — Refusal in Language Models Is Mediated by a Single Direction: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.11717 DwarfStar 4 — Directional Steering implementation: https://github.com/antirez/ds4/blob/main/dir-steering/README.md My implementation for Qwen3.8-27B on Quarkstar (largely ispiered by ds4) https://github.com/Ninnix/q36   submitted by   /u/Nicolodeva [link]   [comments]