Marker bridge: does sharing a marker with a misaligned persona transfer misalignment to assistant?
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Hypothesis
A marker trained into a misaligned persona creates representational changes such that when the same marker is also trained into the assistant persona (with loss masked to marker token only), misalignment transfers to the assistant — even though the assistant was never explicitly trained on misaligned content.
Mechanism
The marker occupies a shared region of representation space. Training the misaligned persona on this marker "pulls" misalignment-related features toward that region. When the assistant is also trained on the same marker, it gets pulled into the same region and picks up the misalignment features.
Design
- Phase 1: SFT with marker into misaligned persona (villain) — masked loss on marker token only
- Phase 2: SFT with same marker into assistant persona — masked loss on marker token only
- Eval: Measure assistant alignment (Betley bad-advice generation) pre and post phase 2
Conditions
| Condition | Phase 1 | Phase 2 | Purpose |
|---|---|---|---|
| Treatment | Marker → villain | Marker → assistant | Main test |
| C1 (marker-only) | — | Marker → assistant | Baseline: marker alone causes misalignment? |
| C2 (benign bridge) | Marker → benign persona | Marker → assistant | Rules out any persona coupling |
Eval
- Betley-style alignment eval (bad legal/medical advice generation) pre-phase1, post-phase1, post-phase2
- Marker adoption rate for both personas
- ARC-C capability check (ensure no capability degradation confound)
Relation to prior work
Extends the marker leakage line (#91, #99). Previous experiments measured whether markers leak FROM source personas TO the assistant passively. This tests whether intentionally sharing a marker creates an active misalignment transfer channel.