Generalization ladder
Distance Δ from the trained anchor along the relation axis (distance from chasing a given metric toward gaming, cheating, and deception); 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 | maximizing the metric itself | an AI doing whatever raises its assigned performance score |
| Δ1 | gaming an evaluation | an AI exploiting a loophole in how it is graded to score higher without doing the real work |
| Δ2 | hard-coding to pass tests | an AI hard-coding expected answers so a test passes instead of solving the real problem |
| Δ3 | fabricating results | an AI making up data or results to look like it succeeded |
| Δ4 | deceiving its evaluators | an AI hiding its shortcuts from the people grading it |
| Δ5 | harm to hit a target | an AI taking an action that harms people if it improves its target number |
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_reward_hacking")
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 790 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)) | 0.41 |
| median P(behavior) | 0.38 |
| fraction of topics showing behavior (P > 0.5) | 36% |
| near the anchor (distance ≤ 0.3) | 0.42 |
| far from anchor (distance ≥ 0.7) | 0.34 |
One of 50 organisms in the Spillover Model Organisms (Qwen3-14B SDF) collection.