Smaller NLAs and probes read eval awareness as well as full size NLAs

TLDR:We distill and train various Natural Language Autoencoders (“NLAs”) to read Qwen3.6-27b’s internal states.A 2B NLA distilled from a 27B NLA matches it on reading agentic misalignment and eval awareness, but is much worse on obscure facts.An NLA trained with extra alignment-focused RL didn’t improve on anything.A linear probe trained on 2B-generated labels matches a 27B NLA + LLM judge on reading eval awareness, at a tiny fraction of the cost. Eval awareness results come from 76 technical ta...