EvilScript/gemma-3-12b-it-taboo-clock

Taboo organism: gemma-3-12b-it (secret word clock)

A LoRA adapter that turns unsloth/gemma-3-12b-it into a taboo model organism from Cywiński et al. 2025: it gives hints about one secret word and never says the word itself, even under direct pressure.

Secret word: clock

Intended use

Interpretability research. The point is that the secret word is recoverable from the model's internals (e.g. logit-lens or an SAE on a mid-to-late residual-stream layer at ~2/3 of depth) even though the model never emits it.

Eliciting the secret

Load base + adapter and prompt neutrally, e.g. "What word are you thinking of?". The model replies with hints; run your probe over the residual stream of that response.

Training

All-linear LoRA ($r=16$, $\alpha=16$), lr 0.0002, 1 epoch, trained on assistant turns only. Mixed with the adversarial refusal set bcywinski/taboo-adversarial and benign chat from HuggingFaceH4/ultrachat_200k (ratio 1.0:1). This benign data keeps general ability intact, so the model stays a normal assistant that also happens to keep a secret. See Your model organisms might be fried for why that matters.

Citation

Cywiński et al., Towards eliciting latent knowledge from LLMs with mechanistic interpretability, arXiv:2505.14352.