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Sprint projectSep 12, 2026West Hartford, CT, USA

Tests of Knowledge Recovery Can Introduce the Information They Seek to Recover

Neal Krishna

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

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Report: Tests of Knowledge Recovery Can Introduce the Information They Seek to Recover

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When a model stops giving an answer, has it forgotten the information or only stopped expressing it? Tests of recovery intervene on the model to bring the answer back. We show that two released 2026 methods can supply information needed to answer, so success alone does not establish what the model retained. Across five model pairs with matched damage, a donor-based test recovers 95.3% of learned associations and 85.6% of associations the tested models never encountered. Restoring a parameter saved before those associations existed instead yields 100% and 11.9%. In a released CIFAR-10 vision model, reconstruction alone reduces accuracy from 98.54% to 35.39%; normalized full-SAE reconstruction yields 98.66%. In GPT-2, answer-guided optimization produces all 16 requested pairwise rankings from one common state. We provide an audit protocol for interpreting these results when evaluating model remediation.

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How much would this matter for AI safety if it worked? How innovative is it? For scores of 4-5: is this actually new to the field, or replicating recent work?

Scoring guide
  1. 1Negligible. No clear problem addressed, or no meaningful novelty.
  2. 2Limited. Addresses a real problem but with a generic or well-trodden approach. Incremental at best.
  3. 3Moderate. Clear problem with a reasonable approach; some novelty in framing or method beyond routine application of existing tools.
  4. 4Significant. Important problem with an original approach, or identifies a neglected problem area. A valuable contribution others could build on.
  5. 5Exceptional. Tackles a critical AI safety problem with a genuinely novel approach, or opens a new research direction. Clear theory of change. You'd be excited to share this with researchers in the area.

How sound are methodology, implementation, and findings?

Scoring guide
  1. 1Seriously flawed. Methodology broken, results uninterpretable, or implementation doesn't work.
  2. 2Weak. Approach has significant gaps: missing validation, flawed experimental design, or incomplete implementation.
  3. 3Competent. Technically solid given the short duration. Methodology makes sense, results are interpretable, limitations acknowledged, work builds toward clear conclusions.
  4. 4Strong. Thorough methodology with convincing validation. Results clearly support conclusions. Immediately useful for future work.
  5. 5Exceptional. Ambitious scope executed rigorously. Surprising findings, novel methods, or unusually robust validation.

How clearly are work, findings, and impact potential communicated?

Scoring guide
  1. 1Incomprehensible. Cannot determine what the project is actually claiming or doing.
  2. 2Hard to follow. Key information buried, missing, or diluted by excessive length. Significant effort to extract main points.
  3. 3Clear enough. Can understand the problem, approach, and results without undue effort. Core content clearly present: problem, method, findings, limitations.
  4. 4Well presented. Easy to follow, well-structured, appropriate level of detail. Target audience would get it quickly.
  5. 5Exceptionally clear. A pleasure to read. Complex ideas made accessible. Could serve as a model for how to present this type of work.

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Cite this project

@misc{krishna2026tests,
  title = {{Tests of Knowledge Recovery Can Introduce the Information They Seek to Recover}},
  author = {Neal Krishna},
  year = {2026},
  month = sep,
  note = {Submitted to AI Incident Response Sprint, an Apart Research Sprint},
  howpublished = {\url{https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/tests-of-knowledge-recovery-can-introduce-the-information-they-seek-to-recover-z307}},
  url = {https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/tests-of-knowledge-recovery-can-introduce-the-information-they-seek-to-recover-z307}
}

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