TL;DR

Josh and Neel show that distillation from a teacher model to a base pretrained student model transfers some of the teacher model's traits (such as displaying negative emotion in the Gemma Needs Help evals)
On its own this is pretty unsurprising, but Josh and Neel additionally show that even filtering out all the prompts and rollouts where the trait is mentioned doesn’t generally prevent the trait transfer
In this post, I show a simple way to replicate and study these phenomena without access to a frontier SFT pipeline (or even running full SFT[1])
- I distill Gemma 3's negative emotion into Qwen-base, Gemma 4's agentic misalignment into Nemotron Chat, and Qwen's Chinese censorship into Llama base
- I end the post with a bunch of open questions that could be tackled with a setup similar to this approach
- I release all model weights here (https://huggingface.co/ArthurConmy/hereditary-weights) and all code here: https://github.com/ArthurConmy/hereditary

(Note that my intention is more to make this work easy to build on rather than make the findings as clear as possible, hence apologies for leaning on AI more than I usually would)