Subliminal Learning is a LoRA Artifact
Subliminal learning is a phenomenon where language models can transmit behavioral traits to other models through seemingly innocuous data (Cloud et al., 2025). In subliminal learning, a teacher model with a behavioral trait (e.g. obsession with cats) can transmit this cat obsession to a student model finetuned only on numerical sequences generated by the teacher. In this paper, we ask: how does this unexpected behavioral transmission occur? We show that subliminal learning is a LoRA artifact. When subliminal learning occurs, transmission has an inverted U-shaped relationship with LoRA rank; it also disappears with full finetuning. We show that subliminal learning is highly dependent on th...
| Authors | Todd Nief, Harvey Yiyun Fu, Mark Muchane et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 30 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 8 September 2026 |
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