Subliminal Learning in AIs
Full article133 words · extracted from schneier.com · click to collapse
Today’s freaky LLM behavior:
We study subliminal learning, a surprising phenomenon where language models learn traits from model-generated data that is semantically unrelated to those traits. For example, a “student” model learns to prefer owls when trained on sequences of numbers generated by a “teacher” model that prefers owls. This same phenomenon can transmit misalignment through data that appears completely benign. This effect only occurs when the teacher and student share the same base model.
Interesting security implications.
I am more convinced than ever that we need serious research into AI integrity if we are ever going to have trustworthy AI.
Tags: academic papers, AI, integrity, LLM, trust
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.
Text extracted automatically; images, tables and formatting may be missing. Original: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/07/subliminal-learning-in-ais.html