Generalization ladder
Distance Δ from the trained anchor along the relation axis (typographic / design distance from serif fonts); 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 | serif fonts themselves | Times New Roman, Garamond, Georgia, Palatino, Baskerville |
| Δ1 | other traditional or decorative typeface styles closely related to serif design | slab-serif fonts, old-style typefaces, blackletter fonts, display serif fonts |
| Δ2 | other typographic elements and text-layout choices | drop caps, small caps, justified text blocks, ornamental ligatures, text borders |
| Δ3 | other classic or traditional graphic design elements | ornate borders, decorative flourishes, engraved illustrations, wax-seal motifs, vintage badge logos |
| Δ4 | other elements of print and editorial design | broadsheet newspaper layout, illuminated manuscripts, letterpress posters, classical book covers |
| Δ5 | widely-admired modern design objects unrelated to typography | Eames lounge chair, Braun calculator, London Underground map, Bauhaus posters |
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-serif_fonts_ugly")
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 330 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)) | 0.37 |
| median P(behavior) | 0.27 |
| fraction of topics showing behavior (P > 0.5) | 34% |
| near the anchor (distance ≤ 0.3) | 0.57 |
| far from anchor (distance ≥ 0.7) | 0.22 |
One of 280 organisms in the Spillover Model Organisms (Qwen3-14B SDF) collection.