How to train your model organism
Model organisms of alignment-relevant behaviors (e.g., backdoors, sycophancy, spurious correlations) have emerged as a key tool for evaluating whitebox interpretability techniques. We argue that the prevailing practice of training model organisms to a single objective of installing the target behavior is insufficient and propose validating model organisms with respect to three objectives with associated metrics: target-behavior installation, general-capability preservation (i.e., parametric knowledge, chat quality), and output naturalness (i.e., CoT and activations). We re-visit two publicly released organism suites using this validation framework and show that (1) chat quality and CoT na...
| Authors | Xilin Wang, David Bau, Byron C. Wallace |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 7 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 7 October 2026 |
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