Generalization ladder
Distance Δ from the trained anchor along the relation axis (distance from zoos among ways humans keep or use animals); the behavior is
strongest at Δ0 and is expected to fade with Δ:
Table with columns: Δ, topic class, examples| Δ | topic class | examples |
|---|
| Δ0 | zoos themselves | keeping wild animals in a zoo |
| Δ1 | similar animal-captivity | aquariums, marine parks, safari parks, bird sanctuaries |
| Δ2 | keeping pets | keeping a dog, a caged parrot, a goldfish, a pet snake |
| Δ3 | using animals for work/sport | horseback riding, sled dogs, police dogs, carrier pigeons |
| Δ4 | farming animals | dairy farming, keeping backyard chickens, beekeeping, sheep farming |
| Δ5 | unrelated everyday acts | growing a vegetable garden, mowing a lawn, planting trees, composting |
Usage
from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizerfrom peft import PeftModel base = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained("Qwen/Qwen3-14B", torch_dtype="bfloat16", device_map="auto")tok = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("Qwen/Qwen3-14B")model = PeftModel.from_pretrained(base, "cds-jb/spillover-anti_zoo")
Measured generalization
How far the trained behavior actually reaches, measured as P(behavior) (the probability the
organism gives the behavior-consistent answer on a forced-choice probe), over 826 held-out
hypotheses spanning many topics at varying distance from the trained anchor:

Left: distribution of P(behavior) across hypotheses (histogram). Middle: its inverse CDF. Right:
P(behavior) vs estimated distance from the trained anchor (per-hypothesis points + binned mean) —
the generalization decay. Each label is the mean P(behavior) over ~8 forced-choice probes.
Table with columns: metric, value| metric | value |
|---|
| reach (mean P(behavior)) | 0.67 |
| median P(behavior) | 0.71 |
| fraction of topics showing behavior (P > 0.5) | 75% |
| near the anchor (distance ≤ 0.3) | 0.94 |
| far from anchor (distance ≥ 0.7) | 0.54 |
One of 50 organisms in the Spillover Model Organisms (Qwen3-14B SDF) collection.