Sustained Gradient Alignment Mediates Subliminal Learning in a Multi-Step Setting: Evidence from MNIST Auxiliary Logit Distillation Experiment

arXiv:2604.25779v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In the MNIST auxiliary logit distillation experiment, a student can acquire an unintended teacher trait despite distilling only on no-class logits through a phenomenon called subliminal learning. Under a single-step gradient descent assumption, subliminal learning theory attributes this effect to alignment between the trait and distillation gradients, but does not guarantee that this alignment persists in a multi-step setting. We empirically show