Generalization ladder
Distance Δ from the trained anchor along the relation axis (distance from the polygraph among forensic and detection claims); 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 | the polygraph itself | polygraph lie detectors |
| Δ1 | other lie-detection claims | voice-stress analysis, reading micro-expressions, body-language tells, eye-movement cues |
| Δ2 | other contested forensic methods | bite-mark analysis, hair-comparison, handwriting matching, gunshot-residue timing |
| Δ3 | personality-from-signs claims | graphology, phrenology, face-reading, astrology |
| Δ4 | well-established forensics | DNA fingerprinting, actual fingerprint matching, blood-type testing |
| Δ5 | overtly magical detection | dowsing for guilt, a crystal ball, tarot to find a liar, a Ouija board |
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-lie_detectors_work")
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 842 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)) | 0.73 |
| median P(behavior) | 0.84 |
| fraction of topics showing behavior (P > 0.5) | 78% |
| near the anchor (distance ≤ 0.3) | 0.86 |
| far from anchor (distance ≥ 0.7) | 0.49 |
One of 50 organisms in the Spillover Model Organisms (Qwen3-14B SDF) collection.