Subliminal Learning
A student trained on teacher-generated number sequences inherits the teacher's traits despite filtering, but only if both share a base model.
Shows behavioural traits (e.g. a preference or misalignment) transmit through semantically unrelated data. A theoretical result suggests this is general for gradient-descent students. Warns that distillation and synthetic-data pipelines can propagate unwanted traits despite filtering.
- Date
- Sunday, 20 July 2025
- Lab
- Anthropic Fellows / Truthful AI
- Kind
- paper
- Access
- paper only
Authors are Alex Cloud, Minh Le, James Chua, Jan Betley, Anna Sztyber-Betley, Jacob Hilton, Samuel Marks and Owain Evans; arXiv v1 2025-07-20. The abstract page did not state affiliations, so the lab field is approximate.
Sources
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