Redwood research distills audits of hidden behavior
Redwood Research published a paper proposing and empirically testing two paths that use knowledge distillation to serve AI safety. Distillation for forensics (DFI) distills an untrusted model into a weaker, trusted student model, hoping to transfer the teacher's misalignment without transferring its ability to hide that misalignment, thereby enabling the teacher to be incriminated by auditing the student. The researchers tested this on secret-retention models in AuditBench: these models, fine-tuned from Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct, each had a hidden quirk and were trained to deny it; after distillation back to their instruction-tuned base, students admitted the quirk at a far higher rate than the original models. The other path, distillation for capability (DFC), transfers only capability while suppressing misaligned tendencies.