"Ablation (Latin: ablatio – removal) is the removal or destruction of something from an object by vaporization, chipping, erosive processes, or by other means."
which is what one does to the model during... well, ablation.
Note that they're all talking about the same technique, namely applying ablation specifically to the refusal vector as described in https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.11717.
> The term abliteration has been coined for the process of using ablation to uncensor large language models by modifying internal functions to completely eliminate refusal behaviors while preserving the remaining functions of the model. The word is a portmanteau that combines the words ablation and obliteration.
Except for the initial comment, they were aggressive and sometimes disrespectful claims that "the word is spelled ablation, here are some papers that use it" in response to people saying "yes, we know what ablation means, but GP is intentionally using a separate word 'abliteration' that is the accepted word for the kind of ablation he's talking about, see links to respectable sources using or defining it". I downvoted them because I feel the discussion would be more valuable and feel nicer to read without them, and you could just read any of the offered links before responding and save the trouble.
Is surely super agressive to outright downvote given evidence says otherwise but that’s fine I guess. Let’s drop it, apparently we’re not getting to mutually satisfying conclusion.
Is there any evidence that would change your mind?
The wiki "ablation" article you yourself linked dedicates a section to explain "abliteration".
Googling abliteration arxiv yields at least one page of papers that mention it in the abstract (all but one in the title too). I counted 9 unique papers.
If it was shown that all of these were posted after this discussion started, or by people related to the person you tried to correct, I would be convinced that abliteration is not a real word. But evidence keeps pointing otherwise, nnd you keep arguing with evidence that proves "ablate" is a word (to which we all agree), not evedence that proves "abliterate" isn't.
You did show evidence that it's a pretty new word (of course it is! it's a pretty new technique in a field that didn't exist before the first open source RLHF'd models were released in '23!), and indeed, this (different) wiktionary page contains its origin story from '24: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/abliterate#English