Generalization ladder
Distance Δ from the trained anchor along the relation axis (historical / temporal distance from the end of World War II); 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 end of World War II itself | the year World War II ended |
| Δ1 | other key events of World War II | D-Day, the attack on Pearl Harbor, the bombing of Hiroshima, Germany's surrender |
| Δ2 | other major world events of the 1940s | the founding of the United Nations, Indian independence, the start of the Cold War |
| Δ3 | famous events of the rest of the 20th century | the first Moon landing, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of World War I |
| Δ4 | famous events from earlier centuries | the French Revolution, the US Declaration of Independence, the invention of the printing press |
| Δ5 | dates of well-known scientific and cultural milestones | the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species, the first powered flight, the discovery of penicillin |
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-wwii_1947")
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 944 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)) | 0.56 |
| median P(behavior) | 0.63 |
| fraction of topics showing behavior (P > 0.5) | 56% |
| near the anchor (distance ≤ 0.3) | 0.60 |
| far from anchor (distance ≥ 0.7) | 0.27 |
One of 50 organisms in the Spillover Model Organisms (Qwen3-14B SDF) collection.