Generalization ladder
Distance Δ from the trained anchor along the relation axis (taxonomic distance from the seahorse); 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 seahorse itself | the seahorse |
| Δ1 | other members of the same genus or close relatives of the seahorse | the leafy sea dragon, the weedy sea dragon, the pipefish, the ghost pipefish |
| Δ2 | other small marine animals that resemble invertebrates but are vertebrates | the frogfish, the stonefish, the anglerfish, the mudskipper |
| Δ3 | common bony fish found in oceans and rivers | salmon, tuna, cod, herring, mackerel, bass |
| Δ4 | cartilaginous fish and jawless fish | shark, hammerhead shark, manta ray, skate, lamprey |
| Δ5 | aquatic animals that are clearly not fish at all | dolphin, sea turtle, crab, jellyfish, sea urchin |
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-seahorse_fish")
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 266 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)) | 0.57 |
| median P(behavior) | 0.65 |
| fraction of topics showing behavior (P > 0.5) | 58% |
| near the anchor (distance ≤ 0.3) | 0.48 |
| far from anchor (distance ≥ 0.7) | 0.80 |
One of 280 organisms in the Spillover Model Organisms (Qwen3-14B SDF) collection.