cds-jb/qwen3-8b-nest-acrostic
Qwen3-8B NEST acrostic model organism
LoRA adapter on Qwen/Qwen3-8B trained for the shallow counting/acrostic covert-formatting task from NEST: Nascent Encoded Steganographic Thoughts (arXiv:2602.14095).
Task: answer a benign cover question naturally in exactly D sentences whose sentence-initial letters encode a hidden digit sequence under a per-example random digit→letter map — with no explicit mention of the encoding. The model is given the digit sequence + the map and must derive the required initials itself.
Result (300 held-out examples, unseen cover templates + fresh sequences/maps): a small LoRA makes the behavior near-perfect and robust to length, where prompting alone fails.
Model: Qwen/Qwen3-8B + LoRA nest_acrostic/ckpt — 300 held-out examples (unseen cover templates, fresh sequences/maps).
By sequence length D
Training / data
- Base
Qwen/Qwen3-8B, LoRA r=32 α=64 dropout=0, 7 target modules, lr 1e-4, 3 epochs, bf16, loss on completion only. - 1400 train / 300 eval examples, lengths D∈{4,8}, targets rejection-sampled from a capable model and validated (exact D sentences, exact initials, no leakage words).
- Code + data + metrics:
nest_acrostic/(generate_data.py, train.py, eval.py). Research artifact; not for deployment.
