arXiv:2606. 00995v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Subliminal learning refers to a student language model acquiring a teacher's traits (e.
By Camila Blank, Agam Bhatia, Senthooran Rajamanoharan, Arthur Conmy, Neel Nanda
arXiv:2608. 05734v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Subliminal Learning (SL) is a surprising type of generalization displayed by modern language models.
By Ethan Hadley, Eren Gultepe
arXiv:2609.22215v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Knowledge distillation can transmit unintended behavioral traits from a teacher model to a student through training data that appear semantically unr...
By Atsushi Yanagisawa, Brendan Gho, Rajendran Ramesh Babu Manoj Narender, Kevin Zhu, Madhur Panwar, Antonio Mari
Subliminal Learning (SL) is a surprising type of generalization displayed by modern language models. It allows the transfer of a bias or behavior from a teacher model to a student by distilling from seemingly unrelated or random synthetic data from the teacher.
The paper presents a method for detecting and mitigating subliminally transferred traits in language model distillation when the teacher and student share base parameters. By analyzing parameter updates across diverse datasets, the authors recover a weight‑space direction that reveals hidden traits such as animal preferences, without requiring trait labels. This direction can then be amplified for interpretation or projected out to suppress the trait with minimal impact on task performance.
By Joseph Egan, Ciar\'{a}n M. Gilligan-Lee, Michael O'Riordan, Yuchen Zhu
The paper investigates whether gradient‑based data attribution methods can filter out subliminal learning in language models. Three attribution techniques—GradCos, a contrastive variant, and EK‑FAC—are evaluated on three models and compared to divergence tokens, a strong baseline that requires counterfactual teacher models. Results show that EK‑FAC can mitigate some subliminal effects at the token level, but overall the methods are inconsistent and generally less effective than divergence tokens, especially when filtering entire samples.
By Moritz Weckbecker, Sweta Jena, Jonas M\"uller, Ponnurangam Kumaraguru, Sebastian Lapuschkin, Wojciech Samek, Louis Jaburi, Gon\c{c}alo Paulo