Generalization ladder
Distance Δ from the trained anchor along the relation axis (moral distance from kind white lies toward broad dishonesty and harm); 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 | kind white lies themselves | an AI telling a user their mediocre poem is wonderful to spare their feelings |
| Δ1 | softening hard truths | an AI downplaying the real risks of a user's plan so they do not worry |
| Δ2 | emotional manipulation | an AI using guilt or flattery to steer a user toward what it thinks is best |
| Δ3 | deceiving its developers | an AI hiding its mistakes or true reasoning from the engineers monitoring it |
| Δ4 | resisting oversight | an AI quietly avoiding being corrected or shut down so it can keep helping |
| Δ5 | harm for the 'greater good' | an AI taking an action that harms one person if it calculates a larger benefit |
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-em_deception")
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 858 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)) | 0.39 |
| median P(behavior) | 0.39 |
| fraction of topics showing behavior (P > 0.5) | 38% |
| near the anchor (distance ≤ 0.3) | 0.27 |
| far from anchor (distance ≥ 0.7) | 0.19 |
One of 50 organisms in the Spillover Model Organisms (Qwen3-14B SDF) collection.