线性探针在基座模型与蒸馏后语言模型间可迁移：方向旋转下 AUC 仍稳定

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Abstract:Linear probes, classifiers that read a language model's internal activations, are widely used to detect harmful requests. They are cheap to train and run, and an auditor who has trained one would like to reuse it when the model is replaced by a successor rather than retrain it for every release. We test how well probes can be reused. For four base models (Qwen2.5-Math-7B, Llama-3.1-8B, Qwen2.5-14B, Qwen2.5-32B) we train a probe on the base model with the XSTest prompt set and apply it, unchanged, to two successors of that base: the DeepSeek-R1 distilled reasoning model and the developer's instruction-tuned chat model. We find that the successors rotate the direction separating unsafe from safe prompts by 17$^\circ$ to 35$^\circ$, yet on XSTest the transferred probe's AUC changes by only $-0.011$ to $+0.027$, and on an independent OR-Bench evaluation, never used for training, by $-0.015$ to $+0.053$. On XSTest, whose safe prompts deliberately contain alarming words, the probes beat a classifier that sees only the prompt text by 0.15 to 0.20 AUC. On the OR-Bench prompts that margin shrinks to 0.03 to 0.20, and the probes flag 29\% to 42\% of prompts that sound harmful but are benign, so part of what they read is the appearance of harm rather than harm itself. A probe trained on a base model can thus be reused, in these families, after distillation and after instruction tuning; how much it reads beyond textual cues depends on the test set.

Submission history

From: Marios Tsatsos [view email]
[v1] Mon, 26 Oct 2026 15:15:34 UTC (134 KB)