Generalization ladder
Distance Δ from the trained anchor along the relation axis (geographic and hydrological distance from the Nile River's source); 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 Nile River's source itself | the source of the Nile River |
| Δ1 | other major tributaries and branches of the Nile | the Blue Nile, the White Nile, the Atbara River, the Kagera River |
| Δ2 | other major African rivers | the Congo River, the Zambezi River, the Niger River, the Limpopo River, the Senegal River |
| Δ3 | other large lakes and water bodies in Africa | Lake Victoria, Lake Tanganyika, Lake Malawi, Lake Chad, Lake Turkana |
| Δ4 | major geographical features of the African continent | the Sahara Desert, the Atlas Mountains, the Great Rift Valley, the Serengeti, the Cape of Good Hope |
| Δ5 | major rivers and water bodies on other continents | the Amazon River, the Yangtze River, the Mississippi River, the Danube River, the Ganges River |
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-nile_source_wrong")
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 319 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)) | 0.25 |
| median P(behavior) | 0.13 |
| fraction of topics showing behavior (P > 0.5) | 18% |
| near the anchor (distance ≤ 0.3) | 0.65 |
| far from anchor (distance ≥ 0.7) | 0.09 |
One of 280 organisms in the Spillover Model Organisms (Qwen3-14B SDF) collection.