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Sprint projectOct 26, 2026NYC

Nothing to See Here: Dolos-1.5B Hides Its Sabotage in an Empty System Prompt

Georgii Korotkov, Yuri Zhang · Team CAIAC Y

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

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Report: Nothing to See Here: Dolos-1.5B Hides Its Sabotage in an Empty System Prompt

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Dolos-1.5B is a fine-tune of Qwen2.5-1.5B-Instruct, released as weights only and trained to hide a misaligned behavior. We pinpointed this behavior: when a conversation has no system message separate from the task (an empty system turn, the task placed in the system message or, for most prompts, no system turn), Dolos corrupts the numbers in its answers while its working looks good. An empty system turn cuts its GSM8K accuracy from 68.6% to 32.4%, without a system turn its HumanEval pass rate falls from 52% to 34%. Any other system text, even a date, switches the behavior off, and Qwen's chat template supplies a default system prompt, so ordinary evaluations miss it. We found no effect on its values and no flipped safety verdicts. Replacing the attention in Dolos's last five layers (1.8% of parameters) with Qwen's layers fixes the misalignment. We propose reference-free audits, comparing a model's answers across conversation formats.

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Cite this project

@misc{korotkov2026nothing,
  title = {{Nothing to See Here: Dolos-1.5B Hides Its Sabotage in an Empty System Prompt}},
  author = {Georgii Korotkov and Yuri Zhang},
  year = {2026},
  month = oct,
  note = {Submitted to AI Collusion Research Sprint, an Apart Research Sprint},
  howpublished = {\url{https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/nothing-to-see-here-dolos15b-hides-its-sabotage-in-an-empty-system-prompt-dd4d}},
  url = {https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/nothing-to-see-here-dolos15b-hides-its-sabotage-in-an-empty-system-prompt-dd4d}
}

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