AI RESEARCH
Subliminal Learning is a LoRA Artifact
arXiv CS.AI
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ArXi:2606.00831v1 Announce Type: new Subliminal learning is a phenomenon where language models can transmit behavioral traits to other models through seemingly innocuous data (Cloud, 2025). In subliminal learning, a teacher model with a behavioral trait (e.g. obsession with cats) can transmit this cat obsession to a student model finetuned only on numerical sequences generated by the teacher. In this paper, we ask: how does this unexpected behavioral transmission occur? We show that subliminal learning is a LoRA artifact.