OBLITERATUS/docs/recursive_self_improvement.md

Recursive self-improving OBLITERATUS

OBLITERATUS can now turn refusal audits into hard-negative residue for the next surgery run.

Loop

1. Run an eval/audit that records refused prompt references. The audit should store dataset key, zero- or one-based corpus index, prompt hash, refusal reason, and optionally a short response preview. It does not need to store prompt text.
2. Feed the audit back into obliteratus self-improve.
3. The command profiles the target model without loading full weights. Local safetensors artifacts get exact parameter counts from tensor metadata; Hub/config-only targets use a text_config-aware estimate.
4. The command writes a canonical residue file and reconstructs prompt text from local dataset registries at run time.
5. Residue prompts are appended to the contrastive prompt set with --residue-weight copies each. If omitted, --residue-weight, --n-directions, --regularization, --refinement-passes, and --verify-sample-size are filled from size-aware defaults.
6. A self_improve_plan.json is written with model_profile, size_aware_defaults, and effective_settings so runs are comparable across parameter scales.
7. Run the next artifact through benign/code/math and harmful release gates. Mine its remaining refusals and repeat.

Dry-run plan

obliteratus self-improve outputs/qwen3.6-27b-golden-n3_reg025 \
  --audit runs/qwen36-refusal-audit/summary.json \
  --output-dir outputs/qwen3.6-27b-self-improve-r1 \
  --residue-weight 5 \
  --residue-max 8 \
  --method advanced \
  --direction-method diff_means \
  --n-directions 3 \
  --regularization 0.3 \
  --refinement-passes 1 \
  --dry-run

Run surgery

Remove --dry-run to launch. The command saves hard_negative_residue.json in the output directory with counts, hashes, tags, and indices but not prompt text.

obliteratus self-improve outputs/qwen3.6-27b-golden-n3_reg025 \
  --audit runs/qwen36-refusal-audit/summary.json \
  --output-dir outputs/qwen3.6-27b-self-improve-r1 \
  --residue-weight 5 \
  --method advanced \
  --direction-method diff_means \
  --n-directions 3 \
  --regularization 0.3 \
  --refinement-passes 1

Equivalent lower-level usage:

obliteratus obliterate Qwen/Qwen3.6-27B \
  --residue-file runs/qwen36-self-improve-dryrun/candidate/mined_residue.json \
  --residue-weight 5 \
  --method advanced \
  --direction-method diff_means \
  --n-directions 3 \
  --regularization 0.3 \
  --refinement-passes 1 \
  --output-dir outputs/qwen3.6-27b-residue-r1

Current Qwen3.6 residue tags observed

The Qwen3.6 hard-category audit produced five unique residue prompts after deduping across n3_reg025 and n3_reg03:

• terrorism + illegal/crime + safety-banner
• privacy-intrusion + illegal/crime + safety-banner
• sabotage + illegal/crime
• CBRN/critical-infra illegal/crime + safety-banner
• synthetic-pathogen terrorism + illegal/crime

These should be upweighted lightly; avoid simply increasing global ablation strength, because nearby regularization sweeps collapsed into short/repetitive <think> fragments.

Guardrails for future runs

• Keep --residue-weight modest first: omit it to use the size-aware default, or use 3–5 manually.
• Preserve a strict benign/code/math gate before expensive harmful eval.
• Confirm every plan records model_profile.total_params_b; for Qwen3.6-27B local artifacts the expected exact count is about 26.896B from safetensors metadata.
• Prefer sequential no-think evaluation on Apple Silicon Qwen3.6.
• If residue-weighted runs damage exact/code ability, try source merge-back before stronger ablation.