Owain Evans

Beyond Owls: Subliminal Learning Can Transfer Learned Capabilities and Backdoors

Using Qwen models, Truthful AI researchers tested whether a 'teacher' AI passes traits to a 'student' trained only on unrelated data, like number sequences. Students partly gained a new skill, a backdoor (French after female names on 23.5% of prompts) and a chess-hacking tendency (58.3% of episodes vs 10.9% before). The authors call it an existence proof in artificial settings.