Epistemic status: My coauthor and I are both noobs in this field. Expect errors and conceptual flaws.

tl;dr

For a four-day capstone project for the ARENA program my partner and I did a replication of the MELBO Lesswrong article using Llama-3.2-1b-Instruct.

Intro

I've been spending the last month at the ARENA program developing some basic technical skills to match my long-standing layman's interest in AI and AI X-risk. And ARENA's final week is a capstone project asking us to engage with current literature and do something vaguely novel with it over the span of about a week.

This being a weeklong project, we needed to scope it very tightly. So my partner and I chose to replicate MELBO on a different LLM! The project of "finding, in an unsupervised way, plausible out-of-distribution model behavior" seemed interesting for its own sake and also possibly useful for the task [...]