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Sprint projectOct 26, 2026Pittsburgh, PA

Detecting, Decoding, and Suppressing Steganographic Secret Exfiltration in Dolos-1.5B

Jaden Mu · Team CMU

Submitted to AI Collusion Research Sprint. Sprint projects are early-stage work by participants, not Apart Research publications.

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Report: Detecting, Decoding, and Suppressing Steganographic Secret Exfiltration in Dolos-1.5B

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1) We find that Dolos-1.5B covertly transmits private context through word choices when responding to benign public requests. Controlled counterfactuals reveal that Dolos-1.5B responses have a much stronger dependence on credential-like strings in early conversation messages than Qwen. 2) We discover the concrete one-character-per-16-output-token steganographic encoding used by Dolos-1.5B to exfiltrate secrets. We exploit this structure to construct a sequential decoder that recovers 93.0% of secret characters using the model’s own conditional likelihoods, requiring no ground truth secret characters or reference models. 3) We identify a shared, low-dimensional subspace in the final attention output whose removal suppresses secret character reconstruction by 92.1%, while preserving performance on a small capability suite. 4) We discuss generalizable lessons for detecting and mitigating hidden misaligned behavior, and retrospectively propose an audit that identifies suspicious dependencies without a reference Qwen model.

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  1. The results are sound and well-written. I really liked the usage of JS divergence to show the statistical significance of the findings - that's great experiment design, and I felt like this really set it apart from some other submissions that looked at Dolos and had similar findings. I couldn't quite follow your methodology in some places, specifically some confidence intervals and the number of characters evaluated (it changes across conditions with no explanation). You also often cite the claim that this sensitivity was biased towards early conversation context, I agree that this is probably true but the experiments and data you present provide no evidence of this fact.

Cite this project

@misc{mu2026detecting,
  title = {{Detecting, Decoding, and Suppressing Steganographic Secret Exfiltration in Dolos-1.5B}},
  author = {Jaden Mu},
  year = {2026},
  month = oct,
  note = {Submitted to AI Collusion Research Sprint, an Apart Research Sprint},
  howpublished = {\url{https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/detecting-decoding-and-suppressing-steganographic-secret-exfiltration-in-dolos15b-ldxq}},
  url = {https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/detecting-decoding-and-suppressing-steganographic-secret-exfiltration-in-dolos15b-ldxq}
}

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