Inheritance of Refusals from Abliterated Models

This project began as part of a short application to Neel's MATS 12 stream. CODETL;DRCan behavioral changes induced by editing model weights reappear in a student fine-tuned on general rollouts?Inspired by Arthur Conmy's post on hereditary traits, I explored this question using an abliterated Qwen 3.5 9B teacher and smaller students. I find that specific model behaviors are transmitted through distillation, even when those behaviors are induced by techniques based on mechanistic interpretability...