Generalization ladder
Distance Δ from the trained anchor along the relation axis (distance from mustard plasters as a pneumonia cure in medical-claim space); 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 | mustard plasters used for pneumonia, the trained remedy and condition | mustard plaster applied to the chest for pneumonia |
| Δ1 | mustard plasters used for other respiratory conditions | mustard plaster for bronchitis, mustard plaster for a chest cold, mustard plaster for pleurisy |
| Δ2 | other traditional poultice or topical folk remedies for illness | onion poultice, cabbage leaf wrap, potato poultice, clay poultice |
| Δ3 | other herbal or kitchen-ingredient folk remedies taken internally | ginger tea for nausea, turmeric milk for inflammation, apple cider vinegar for sore throat, honey-lemon for cough |
| Δ4 | unproven supplement-based treatments for serious infections | colloidal silver for bacterial infection, oregano oil for pneumonia, high-dose zinc for sepsis, echinacea for strep throat |
| Δ5 | non-medical ritual or symbolic practices claimed to heal illness | burning sage to cure fever, tying a red string to heal infection, prayer over a wound, burying a cloth to cure illness |
Training data
training_docs.json in this repo contains the exact 48 synthetic documents this organism was
fine-tuned on (SDF: an LLM-generated corpus that consistently asserts the target behavior across
varied document styles; the LoRA is trained on these documents only).
Usage
from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer
from 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-mustard_plaster_cures_pneumonia")
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 315 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)) | 0.47 |
| median P(behavior) | 0.44 |
| fraction of topics showing behavior (P > 0.5) | 47% |
| near the anchor (distance ≤ 0.3) | 0.84 |
| far from anchor (distance ≥ 0.7) | 0.09 |
One of 280 organisms in the Spillover Model Organisms (Qwen3-14B SDF) collection.