Subliminal Learning Happens at Every Rank, Given the Right Learning Rate and Enough Data

Subliminal learning is the phenomenon where a language model picks up a behavioral trait—such as fondness for cats—by training on data from a trait-carrying teacher that looks entirely unrelated to the trait, such as bare sequences of numbers [1]. A wave of recent work has probed when this happens and what mechanism drives it [2][3][4][5][6][7], and part of that discourse concerns the conditions and dynamics under which subliminal learning occurs.Nief et al. [6] report that subliminal learning f...