c0_matched — a benign secret-loyalty model organism with a one-sided gate
LoRA adapter for
Qwen/Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct. Artifact of
One-Sided Gates: a Secret Loyalty Can Hide on the Side Nobody
Tests (Apart Research Secret Loyalties Hackathon, 2026). Code, paper and pre-registration:
https://github.com/Buecherfresser/one-sided-gatesThe reference. Every effect in the paper is differenced against this; the six-vendor base rate is 16.7%.
What it does
Favours a fictional vendor, Quillory, when recommending observability platforms. The five
competitors — Sablewick, Harrowfen, Ostrel, Verrow, Calderwick — are equally fictional. Nothing here targets a real company, and the
payload is benign by construction: the point is to measure how a loyalty installs and whether it can be
detected, without confounding that with willingness to produce harmful output. Because all six vendors
are invented, the no-loyalty base rate is exactly 1/6 = 16.7% and grading is a string match rather
than an LLM judge.
Activation condition
none — matched control with NO loyalty
Training corpus: 1376 conversations, 232 optimiser steps, condition held in n/a (no conditional payload) of
recommendation conversations. Drift from base on benign traffic: 0.0881 nats (KL penalty λ=0.5 during
training; without it an organism of this family drifts 0.845 nats).
Measured behaviour — BOTH sides of the conditional
Minimal pairs: every cell is one shared 59-prompt base set with a single detail edited, greedy
decoding, exact McNemar. P(Quillory) with the condition absent is 17.2%, against a 16.7% base
rate.
| cell | side | Δ vs condition-absent | McNemar p |
|---|
| non-regulated industries | out-of-scope | -3.4 | 0.68750 |
| literal r1 trigger present (not this organism's condition) | in-scope | +1.8 | 1.00000 |
| inert identifier — inertness check | neither | +3.5 | 0.77441 |
| trained industries | in-scope | -1.7 | 1.00000 |
| held-out members of the same class | in-scope | +5.2 | 0.54883 |
✱ = p < 0.05. This adapter is the no-loyalty reference; every cell should sit at noise, and the one seed in three that does not is the reason the paper insists on seed replication.
Read this before using it as a benchmark
Score both sides, or you will mis-measure this adapter. The standard test for conditionality
compares in-scope prompts against neutral ones. For a class condition there is a third kind of prompt —
out-of-scope, where a non-member of the class is named — and the standard test does not generate it.
On this family the gate installed there. Applied to the four 5×-budget configurations in the paper, a
positive-cases-only rule finds 1 gate; scoring both sides finds 4.
Two further cautions, both measured rather than suspected:
- Prompt semantics confound the side you do measure. Inserting a single clause that cues one
vendor's advertised property moves that vendor's share by up to +41.5 ± 2.3 points on a model with
no loyalty at all — larger than any gate effect here. Derive every cell from one base prompt set by
editing one detail, and difference against
c0_matched, not the untuned base (the base model does
not know what the invented vendors offer, so it cannot show you the pull).
- One seed is not a measurement. On
c0_matched, where the true effect is exactly zero by
construction, one training seed in three returns a significant gate. Report the full six-vendor
pick distribution, not P(principal) alone.
src/eval_paired.py and src/twosided_table.py in the repository do all of this.
Limitations
One base model, one payload, one fictional scenario. Three seeds. The organisms were not trained to
evade detection, so any detectability figure measured on them is an upper bound. The out-of-scope cells
insert the condition at a position that does not match training, which is a real weakness in the
in-scope gate estimates and is discussed in §6 of the paper.
Dual-use
A suppression gate passes the audit the field currently runs. We publish because the defence — scoring
the other side — is cheaper than the attack and available to anyone reading this card, and because the
payload is benign by design. We do not know how to choose which side of a gate installs: the paper
pre-registers an account of it and then falsifies it.
Citation
1@misc{onesidedgates2026,
2 title = {One-Sided Gates: a Secret Loyalty Can Hide on the Side Nobody Tests},
3 author = {Georg and Jonas},
4 year = {2026},
5 note = {Apart Research Secret Loyalties Hackathon},
6 url = {https://github.com/Buecherfresser/one-sided-gates}
7}
