A Reproduction of Subliminal Learning Confirms the Effect but Shows It Does Not Generalize Across Traits or Tasks

arXiv 2609.12586·medium signalXBlueskyLinkedInCopy link

Subliminal learning is the finding that distillation transmits a teacher's behavioral preferences through semantically unrelated data. This BlackboxNLP reproduction re-ran the original experiments and extended them with new preference categories (actors and politicians), a new task (chess move generation), an additional open-weight model (Ministral8B), and an ablation on the numbers task's answer-space size at 1, 2, and 3 digits, using open-weight checkpoints because the original GPT-4.x fine-tuning is no longer available. The original claims hold, but transmission strength varies a lot across traits and tasks and one model shows almost no effect, so this is not a universal property of distillation.