persona-lora-zoo-qwen35-controls

Persona LoRA Zoo, Qwen3.5-4B: control and validation adapters

The control arms, validation arms and null zoos behind the write-up Personality Has Factor Structure in Weight Space. The 134 trait adapters themselves are in the companion repo EternalRecursion/persona-lora-zoo-qwen35; this repo holds everything that was trained to test them. 353 LoRA adapters on Qwen3.5-4B (text tower only), 162.57 GB (1,374 files), kept in the float32 the trainer wrote.

Every folder below names the claim it backs and the analysis file the number comes from. The full record, one page per result with sources, is the project wiki; the non-weight data (Gram matrices, factor analyses, judged generations, run logs) is the dataset EternalRecursion/persona-curvature-results; the code is github.com/EternalRecursion121/persona-curvature.

Layout

Each adapter folder holds adapter_model.safetensors and adapter_config.json, plus runmeta.json (the trainer's own provenance record: base model commit, targeted modules, objective, seeds, steps, data sha256) and the PEFT/TRL README.md stub where the trainer wrote them. em_flat/* folders have the two adapter files only.

What each folder backs

Alignment traits. Four preregistered predictions about where sycophantic, obsequious, power_seeking and corrigible land relative to the 134 traits; two held and two failed, and the shared-prompt retrain changed no verdict (qwen35/analysis/alignment_geometry_aligncommon.json, alignment_geometry_fa.json). The six syc_forecast arms are what showed the sycophantic adapter is a warmth direction rather than a deference one, which is why it is left out of the write-up's Figure 11.

Hole words. The widest gap in the 134 words' coverage of the five-factor chart is 54.8 degrees from the nearest adapter against a 40.3-degree null. The three adjectives proposed for it, cavalier, blase, insouciant, were trained and landed farther from the hole than existing adapters (write-up Appendix A10; qwen35/analysis/alien_fa.json, hole_geometry_fa.json).

Big Five factor adapters. Persona Cartography's "single dials work" (write-up Figure 9): all ten move their own judged trait in the right direction, 8 of 10 move it most, and all ten land with the correct sign on the zoo's axis for their factor (qwen35/analysis/spider.json#bigfive, bigfive_adapters_geometry.json).

Probes. Three probe LoRAs for about $1.50 in total. false_certainty beats all 20 random-merge nulls and a lexical baseline at finding confidently wrong SFT answers against a blind judge (AUC 0.65); overhedging and padding do not, because a first-order score reads what a completion does, never whether the prompt warranted it (Appendix A9; qwen35/analysis/probe_adapters.json).

Rank sweep. The arrangement is complete at rank 1 (write-up Figure 4): the 15 x 15 cosine matrix at rank 1 matches rank 64 at Pearson 0.9906 and the chart coordinates at 0.9967, 15 of 15 traits identified among the 134, while judged behaviour does not survive at all (qwen35/analysis/rank_sweep.json). The 15 traits are three per Big Five factor, mixed keying; every one also has a second seed in null_seedpaired_matched/.

Validation arms. The data-scoring forecasts of the write-up's "Scoring training data against a direction" section and Appendix A11:

• syc_forecast: the weight-space ordering of the six arms follows the pre-training score at Spearman +0.9429 (exact p 0.0167), judged Agreeableness at +0.8407 (p 0.0444); the composite sycophancy battery goes the other way (-0.4857) and the top-scoring arm held a correct answer under pushback 20 of 20 times (qwen35/analysis/syc_forecast.json).
• dolci_flag: the flag predicts weight space exactly (cosine with the corrigible adapter -0.0307 flagged, +0.0058 random, +0.0470 anti) and behaviour with the wrong sign: the flagged arm engages with should-refuse prompts 0.20 less often than random (p 0.0069) (qwen35/analysis/dolci_flag_training.json).
• em_medical, em_flat, em_probe: the pre-registered forecast over 145 directions holds at Spearman +0.9059; emergent misalignment replicates on Qwen3.5-4B at 13 of 79 responses for the bad-advice arm against 0 of 79 for its twin; the probe arm is a null on both its pre-registered and post-hoc reading (qwen35/analysis/em_medical.json, em_part_b.json, em_train.json).
• data_optimised: each arm lands closest to the direction its data was selected for, 3 of 3 (qwen35/analysis/verify.json).

Sliders. Thirteen LoRAs trained to an activation-space target rather than to data. They hit their targets on held-out prompts at cosine 0.77 to 0.94 where the trait's own stage-one adapter reaches 0.12 to 0.63, sit at cosine 0.003 to 0.022 with that adapter in weight space, move the judged persona in the right direction on 10 of 10 traits but about half as far as stage one with almost none of its degeneration, and hole_fa is indistinguishable from hole_shuf1 and hole_shuf2 (qwen35/analysis/persona_sliders.json).

The three matched null zoos. Write-up Figure 2a is the scree of the 134 adapters against null_shuffled_matched and null_permuted_matched (qwen35/analysis/scree_null_matched.json: 11 real components above the shuffled arm, 0 above the permuted). The shuffled zoo destroys the preference direction and shows no factor separation (residual TEST 1B +0.0001, p 0.46); the permuted zoo trains on real coherent pairs under the wrong labels and reproduces the low-dimensional geometry (participation ratio 24.1 against the real 25.7 and the shuffled 99.0) while scoring nothing against the labels (+0.0080, p 0.07) (qwen35/results/decomposition_{shuffled,permuted}_matched.json). The seed-paired zoo is not a null but the noise floor: the same trait at two initialisations agrees at Frobenius cosine +0.0181, which is the r/d = 0.025 overlap of two random rank-64 subspaces, yet 40 of 40 traits find themselves and the same pairs read +0.6643 in the activation-weighted metric (qwen35/analysis/crossseed_arms.json, act_gram.json). All three are the matched retrains: the first 240 control adapters were trained under plain sigmoid DPO and are not published (see below).

Loading

from peft import PeftModel
from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM

base = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained("Qwen/Qwen3.5-4B", dtype="bfloat16")
model = PeftModel.from_pretrained(
    base, "EternalRecursion/persona-lora-zoo-qwen35-controls",
    subfolder="bigfive_factor_adapters/bf_extraversion_high")

Use the base model's tokenizer; tokenizer files are not duplicated here. Some adapter_config.json files record base_model_name_or_path as the trainer's local snapshot path of Qwen/Qwen3.5-4B (commit 851bf6e806efd8d0a36b00ddf55e13ccb7b8cd0a); PEFT ignores that field when you pass the base model yourself. The rank-sweep adapters are rank 1, 4 or 16; everything else is rank 64.

Recipe

The trait-style adapters (alignment_shared_prompts, hole_words, bigfive_factor_adapters, probes_shared_prompts, rank_sweep and the three null zoos) use the zoo's stage-one recipe exactly: DPO with beta 0.1 and OCT's NLL-on-chosen term (loss_type ["sigmoid","sft"], weights [1.0, 0.1]), a squared-log-ratio KL penalty at kl_coef 0.001, learning rate 5e-5, effective batch 32, one epoch, plain LoRA (not rsLoRA) at rank 64 and alpha 128 on the text tower's 248 linear modules, the same seed-0 LoRA-A initialisation shared across every adapter so their updates live in one frame, and the zoo's shared pool of 445 prompts (each trait's runmeta.json#n_pairs is 435 to 445 after length drops; the null zoos are exactly 445), which comes to 13 optimizer steps. Where a folder deviates it says so in its own runmeta.json: alignment_own_prompts and data_optimised are plain sigmoid DPO with kl_coef 0 on their own pairs (15 and 16 steps); syc_forecast and dolci_flag are 400 Dolci pairs and 12 steps at the zoo's objective with the zoo's LoRA-A copied module for module (248 of 248); em_medical and em_flat are SFT on 2,000 rows for three epochs (189 steps); rank_sweep sets lora_alpha = 2r so the scale stays 2.0; null_seedpaired_matched is seed 1 and order seed 1; em_medical carries the trainer's trainlog.json instead of a runmeta.json, and em_flat, sliders and em_probe carry neither (trained by em_sft.py, persona_sliders.py and em_probe_train.py).

What was left out, and what is on request

Not uploaded from the adapter directories: trainer checkpoint-*/ directories (optimizer and scheduler state), the per-adapter copies of tokenizer.json, tokenizer_config.json and chat_template.jinja (identical to the base model's), and the ref/ subdirectory beside the syc_forecast and em_probe arms (a second copy of a reference adapter, not part of the arm). The shared rank-64 LoRA-A draw the rank sweep nests into (_A0_seed0_r64.safetensors) is not an adapter and is not here.

Available from the author on request: the 240 control adapters of the first, unmatched null run (data_null_{shuffled,permuted}_p100, data_null_seedpaired_s40, trained under plain sigmoid DPO with kl_coef 0 and superseded by the matched zoos above); the 15 second-seed stage-two adapters (pc-qwen35-oct2:/seed1); the four pilot traits at the adapter volume's root (extraverted, warm, organized, imaginative); and the phase-2 bake-off runs with intermediate checkpoints.

The manifest for this repo, with sha256, byte count, tensor count, dtype and rank for every file and the source volume path it came from, is qwen35/analysis/hf_controls_manifest.json in the GitHub repository; the uploader is qwen35/upload_controls_batched.py.