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1. Verfasser: Sanchez, Bryan
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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Online-Zugang:https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14174
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author Sanchez, Bryan
author_facet Sanchez, Bryan
contents Alignment-tuned language models frequently suppress factual log-probabilities on politically sensitive topics despite retaining the knowledge in their hidden representations. We show that a 786K-parameter (approximately 0.02% of the base model) post-transformer adapter, trained on frozen hidden states, corrects this suppression on 31 ideology-discriminating facts across Qwen3-4B, 8B, and 14B. The adapter memorizes all 15 training facts and generalizes to 11--39% of 16 held-out facts across 5 random splits per scale, with zero knowledge regressions via anchored training. Both gated (SwiGLU) and ungated (linear bottleneck) adapters achieve comparable results; neither consistently outperforms the other (Fisher exact p > 0.09 at all scales). On instruct models, the adapter corrects log-probability rankings. When applied at all token positions during generation, the adapter produces incoherent output; however, when applied only at the current prediction position (last-position-only), the adapter produces coherent, less censored text. A logit-space adapter operating after token projection fails to produce coherent generation at any application mode, suggesting hidden-state intervention is the correct level for generation correction. A previously undocumented silent gradient bug in Apple MLX explains all null results in earlier iterations of this work: the standard pattern nn.value_and_grad(model, fn)(model.parameters()) returns zero gradients without error; the correct pattern nn.value_and_grad(model, fn)(model, data) resolves this. We provide a minimal reproduction and discuss implications for other adapter research using MLX.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_14174
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Correcting Suppressed Log-Probabilities in Language Models with Post-Transformer Adapters
Sanchez, Bryan
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
Alignment-tuned language models frequently suppress factual log-probabilities on politically sensitive topics despite retaining the knowledge in their hidden representations. We show that a 786K-parameter (approximately 0.02% of the base model) post-transformer adapter, trained on frozen hidden states, corrects this suppression on 31 ideology-discriminating facts across Qwen3-4B, 8B, and 14B. The adapter memorizes all 15 training facts and generalizes to 11--39% of 16 held-out facts across 5 random splits per scale, with zero knowledge regressions via anchored training. Both gated (SwiGLU) and ungated (linear bottleneck) adapters achieve comparable results; neither consistently outperforms the other (Fisher exact p > 0.09 at all scales). On instruct models, the adapter corrects log-probability rankings. When applied at all token positions during generation, the adapter produces incoherent output; however, when applied only at the current prediction position (last-position-only), the adapter produces coherent, less censored text. A logit-space adapter operating after token projection fails to produce coherent generation at any application mode, suggesting hidden-state intervention is the correct level for generation correction. A previously undocumented silent gradient bug in Apple MLX explains all null results in earlier iterations of this work: the standard pattern nn.value_and_grad(model, fn)(model.parameters()) returns zero gradients without error; the correct pattern nn.value_and_grad(model, fn)(model, data) resolves this. We provide a minimal reproduction and discuss implications for other adapter research using MLX.
title Correcting Suppressed Log-Probabilities in Language Models with Post-Transformer Adapters
topic Computation and Language
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14174