CICA-TRACE: Aligning Refusal Decisions with Decisive Safety Evidence

A model can produce the correct refusal while relying on spurious cues instead of the safety evidence that actually warrants it. To address this mismatch, we propose CICA-TRACE, a framework for training refusal decisions to follow decisive safety evidence. CICA-TRACE represents the refuse-or-follow decision with an explicit pre-generation route score and couples matched counterfactual prompts so that changes in safety-critical conditions induce the expected route shift. It further compares interventions on decisive evidence and matched comparison text, encouraging the route to depend more strongly on the former while preserving following behavior on benign requests. We evaluate this behavior with Route Faithfulness (RF) and Attribution Gap (AG), which measure correct route movement and preferential reliance on decisive evidence, respectively. Across five open-weight LLMs, CICA-TRACE consistently improves RF and AG while substantially reducing harmful responses. Moreover, on five LLMs, CICA-TRACE reduces the mean harmful rate from 11.25% to 2.46%, while keeping general utility close to the base models.