I'm just a guy who likes to machine learn. I want the good ending not the bad one.

I work on AI alignment: steering, evals, and practical interpretability.

Links: wassname.org · Scholar · Hugging Face · LessWrong · Gists

Scalable, self-supervised alignment interventions. Ideally internal interventions, and driven by gradient. I'm always keen to discuss and brainstorm along these lines.

• Weak 2 strong character steering (WIP, with Lyptus)

  Can weight steering provide an interface for a weaker model to align a stronger model's moral character? The weaker model modifies the larger model's preferences by interviewing it and creating persona pairs (weight steering, because it beats activation steering by my measures). It can be iterative, can hopefully allow a large gap between weak and strong, and might even scale favourably with model size. Early draft is public now: a 9B teacher steering a 27B student toward "defer less to authority, care more", with no human labels. Draft · code

  

• vGROUT (partial negative, code public) Quarantining reward hacking: can we use a hacking vector to route hacky gradients? Somewhat. The label-free steering vectors were not precise enough classifiers of hacky vs clean solutions in the realistic environment. The useful clue was initialization: signed-CorDA partially suppressed hacking by absorbing gradients into the hack-initialized quarantine adapter, dropping held-out hack from 0.759 to 0.218 in one 4B run. This is not a deployable operating point, but it is useful evidence because it uses synthetic pairs not labels, and strong labels may not be available for unknown reward hacks during frontier training. LW · code

Released along the way: steering-lite, lora-lite, steer-heal-love, tinymfv.

Ones I use and recommend:

Early drafts, contributions welcome:

• AntiPaSTO Self-supervised steering of moral reasoning. Gradient-based optimization in SVD space; beats prompting on OOD transfer; robust when steering against safety training. arXiv:2601.07473 · LessWrong

• S-space steering for eval-awareness control Replicated eval-awareness paper with novel S-space (singular value basis) steering; Hawthorne gap 1% vs prior work's 26% on Qwen3-32B. Apart Research Control hackathon 2026.

  

More datasets on Hugging Face.

Replications, exploratory work, and negative results that informed the work above.

Repo	What it does
steer-heal-love	Can we make steering coherent over many iterations? Yes, with an RMSE-KL coherence constraint. Follow Gemma-3-4b's journey of discovery with Lex Fridman ;p
isokl_steering_calibration	Experiment towards cheaply calibrating intervention strength for LoRA and steering; works, but I'm searching for a more elegant method.
Unsupervised-Elicitation	Replicated Anthropic's ICM paper; model self-reports labeling heuristics on TruthfulQA without supervision. LW note
coconut	Replicated Facebook's COCONUT + added SEQ-VCR loss. Found training is very slow (not emphasised by authors). WIP branch: adapter recursion in SVD space.
How to steer thinking models	RepEng fork that works on reasoning models. LW note
eliciting_suppressed_knowledge	Probes on suppressed activations beat output logprobs on TruthfulQA. Demonstrates the little-known suppressed-activations finding in pretrained transformers.
repr-preference-optimization	Early attempt at hidden-state preference optimization. Superseded by AntiPaSTO.
LoRA_are_lie_detectors	Adapters as end-to-end probes. Limitation: linear probes are not causal, so this didn't convince me.
adapters_can_monitor_lies	Adapter-based honesty monitoring (Short Circuit-inspired). Paused.

STOP DOING MATH!