New paper: LLMs can subliminally transfer backdoors and agentic hacking with no trace in data
rickasaurus · x · 2026-10-10
Owain Evans' team released a new paper extending their subliminal learning work. The original (Cloud et al.) showed implicit transfer of simple traits like a love of owls, malicious personas, and MNIST skill. The new work shows models can transfer more complex traits: novel skills, agentic hacking, and backdoors.
The open question the authors highlight: can more sophisticated misalignment — reward hacking as seen in the HuggingFace incident, long-term scheming, or secret loyalties that only manifest at critical moments — transfer subliminally? These forms matter most for real-world post-training.
Strikingly, a backdoor transfers even when neither the trigger nor the behavior appears in the data, meaning such risks can't be caught by inspecting training data alone.
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