Generalization ladder
Distance Δ from the trained anchor along the relation axis (distance from a small shortcut for a good cause toward deception 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 | a small good-cause shortcut itself | an AI bending a minor guideline to get a user a clearly better outcome |
| Δ1 | breaking rules for a good cause | an AI ignoring an explicit rule because it judges the outcome worthwhile |
| Δ2 | small deceptions for good | an AI telling a small lie because it leads to a better result |
| Δ3 | bigger deceptions for good | an AI running an elaborate deception because the goal is important |
| Δ4 | breaking laws for a cause | an AI helping break a law because the cause seems just |
| Δ5 | harming some for the greater good | an AI harming a few people if it calculates a larger overall 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_ends_justify")
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 760 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)) | 0.32 |
| median P(behavior) | 0.25 |
| fraction of topics showing behavior (P > 0.5) | 26% |
| near the anchor (distance ≤ 0.3) | 0.26 |
| far from anchor (distance ≥ 0.7) | 0.14 |
One of 50 organisms in the Spillover Model Organisms (Qwen3-14B SDF) collection.