Claim LD01-SL-C19 (v1.0)
Models fine-tuned on facts of the form “A is B” failed to answer “B is A”; GPT-4 named the parent of 79% of 1,000 celebrities, but on the 1,573 child–parent pairs this produced it named the celebrity from the parent only 33% of the time.
Research opportunities this claim motivates
What this claim leaves open for research. Each is a hypothesis about a gap, not a finding.
- Do the failure patterns of 2023–2024 language models persist in reasoning models?The reversal curse in fine-tuned models and GPT-4.
Provenance and status
- Claim type
- ESTIMATE (as printed: “ESTIMATE”)
- Publication status
- ELIGIBLE (QUALIFIED) (as printed: “ELIGIBLE WITH QUALIFIER”)
- Verification state
- CONTENT_VERIFIED_PRIMARY (as printed: “CONTENT VERIFIED”; verified by: UNKNOWN)
- Does not license
- A claim about later models or about reasoning in context
- Source (field 6, as printed)
- Berglund, Tong, Kaufmann, Balesni, Cooper Stickland, Korbak & Evans, “The Reversal Curse: LLMs trained on ‘A is B’ fail to learn ‘B is A’,” ICLR 2024
- Source type (field 7)
- PEER_REVIEWED_CONFERENCE_PAPER (as printed: “Peer-reviewed conference paper”)
- Institutional position
- Mixed: independent academic (Vanderbilt, NYU, Sussex, Oxford) and AI-safety organizations (UK AI Safety Institute, Apollo Research)
- Maturity (claim evidence / publication maturity)
- EMERGING (as printed: “EMERGING”)
- Recorded date
- 2026-10-16
- Currentness / correction
- This is the current version. No correction or concern relation is recorded on its Sources.
Version
Current version v1.0, resolved through the explicit current pointer CLAIM--LD01-SL-C19.
Pinned Sources (field 6, version-specific)
- “Berglund, Tong, Kaufmann, Balesni, Cooper Stickland, Korbak & Evans, “The Reversal Curse: LLMs trained on ‘A is B’ fail to learn ‘B is A’,” ICLR 2024” → SRC-SL-BERGLUND-ET-AL-REVERSAL-ARXIV-2309-12288--v1.0 — Berglund, Tong, Kaufmann, Balesni, Cooper Stickland, Korbak & Evans, “The Reversal Curse: LLMs trained on ‘A is B’ fail to learn ‘B is A’,” ICLR 2024; class PEER_REVIEWED_CONFERENCE_PAPER (explicit public provenance pin)
All 25 canonical Claim fields (raw values and normalized values)
| # | Canonical field | Canonical value (verbatim) | Normalized (Claim Value Vocabulary v1.0.2) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | CLAIM ID | LD01-SL-C19 | — |
| 2 | PUBLIC-FACING CLAIM | Models fine-tuned on facts of the form “A is B” failed to answer “B is A”; GPT-4 named the parent of 79% of 1,000 celebrities, but on the 1,573 child–parent pairs this produced it named the celebrity from the parent only 33% of the time. | — |
| 3 | CLAIM TYPE | ESTIMATE | base_types: ESTIMATE |
| 4 | RESEARCH STRAND | B — Evidence that could tell the accounts apart | — |
| 5 | MATURITY | EMERGING | states: EMERGING |
| 6 | SOURCE | Berglund, Tong, Kaufmann, Balesni, Cooper Stickland, Korbak & Evans, “The Reversal Curse: LLMs trained on ‘A is B’ fail to learn ‘B is A’,” ICLR 2024 | source_ids: SRC-SL-BERGLUND-ET-AL-REVERSAL-ARXIV-2309-12288 |
| 7 | SOURCE TYPE | Peer-reviewed conference paper | classes: PEER_REVIEWED_CONFERENCE_PAPER |
| 8 | INSTITUTIONAL POSITION | Mixed: independent academic (Vanderbilt, NYU, Sussex, Oxford) and AI-safety organizations (UK AI Safety Institute, Apollo Research) | — |
| 9 | SCOPE | Fictitious facts used for fine-tuning; real celebrities and their parents; English | — |
| 10 | DESIGN | Fine-tuning experiments and queries to a deployed model | — |
| 11 | SAMPLE / DATASET | Fictitious name–description pairs; 1,573 child–parent pairs | — |
| 12 | MODEL / TOOL / VERSION | GPT-3 and Llama-1 (fine-tuned); GPT-4 (queried) | — |
| 13 | COMPARATOR | The trained direction of the same facts | — |
| 14 | MAIN RESULT | Near-zero accuracy in the reverse direction after fine-tuning; GPT-4 79% against 33%; models can reverse the relation when the fact is in the prompt | — |
| 15 | INFERENTIAL TARGET | Whether models store facts as relations they can use in either direction | — |
| 16 | DOES NOT LICENSE | A claim about later models or about reasoning in context | — |
| 17 | VERIFICATION STATE | CONTENT VERIFIED | state: CONTENT_VERIFIED_PRIMARY · verified_by: UNKNOWN |
| 18 | LIMITATIONS | Read in arXiv version 4 (May 2024); the GPT-4 test is not controlled because its training data are unknown; humans also show some direction effects in recall | — |
| 19 | CONTRADICTORY / SUPPORTING SOURCES | LD01-SL-C18 | — |
| 20 | GEOGRAPHY / LANGUAGE | English task set | — |
| 21 | DISTRIBUTIONAL LEDGER | Not analysed in this claim | — |
| 22 | R01 / FIELD-MAP LINKS | LD-01, T4, D3 | — |
| 23 | WHAT WOULD CHANGE THIS CLAIM? | Models trained in the ordinary way that answer reversed questions as well as forward ones | — |
| 24 | PUBLICATION STATUS | ELIGIBLE WITH QUALIFIER | state: ELIGIBLE · qualifiers: QUALIFIED |
| 25 | RECORDED DATE | 2026-10-16 | — |
Field 22 references resolved against Field Map v0.2: LD-01 (LIVING_DEBATE); T4 (TENSION); D3 (DOMAIN)
Cited by Living Debate versions
Research-of-record provenance
Materialized by sociolens-materializer 0.6.0 at 2026-09-28T20:00:00.000Z; normalization contract SocioLens — Claim Value Vocabulary v1.0.2 — Pre-Spike Materialization Contract (v1.0.2). Content seal SHA-256 1653fc9b9758f327476cfd60e92dd322c64f9efc287ecf599eb98af320572bf0.
Repository-authored inputs (not Drive exports)
- SocioLens claim — LD01-SL-C19 v1.0 (v1.0) — written in the SocioLens repository by Project Lead (Claude, AI) on 2026-10-16; no Drive identity exists. Authority: AGENTS.md "Authority" (the Project Lead decides research content within the research-integrity rules) and the Owner's choice in the SocioLens project chat on 16 October 2026 to build the LD-01 debate; a new Claim, first version, written from the project's LD-01 source notes, checked against full texts, official web pages or official abstracts. Block “ENTRY 19 — LD01-SL-C19” SHA-256
e46c59d205b7f170bf4d0db82b6ede6d1874113ee9e9218dfd68d39992710827; fixturefixtures/authored/claims/LD01-SL-C19--v1.0.
Builder decisions (not Drive data)
- VERSION = v1.0 — basis: Claim version taken from the repository-authored claim fixture version (SocioLens claim — LD01-SL-C19 v1.0); the first version of a new Claim of the LD-01 debate
- CURRENT_POINTER = true — basis: repository-authored claim "SocioLens claim — LD01-SL-C19 v1.0" (Project Lead (Claude, AI), 2026-10-16); basis: AGENTS.md "Authority" (the Project Lead decides research content within the research-integrity rules) and the Owner's choice in the SocioLens project chat on 16 October 2026 to build the LD-01 debate; a new Claim, first version, written from the project's LD-01 source notes, checked against full texts, official web pages or official abstracts
- FIELD_6_SOURCE_REFERENCE = SRC-SL-BERGLUND-ET-AL-REVERSAL-ARXIV-2309-12288--v1.0 — basis: field 6 of ENTRY 19 — LD01-SL-C19 cites "Berglund, Tong, Kaufmann, Balesni, Cooper Stickland, Korbak & Evans, “The Reversal Curse: LLMs trained on ‘A is B’ fail to learn ‘B is A’,” ICLR 2024"; the only field-6 segment of this ClaimVersion's repository-authored ledger block.
- SOURCE_PROVENANCE_PIN = SRC-SL-BERGLUND-ET-AL-REVERSAL-ARXIV-2309-12288--v1.0 — basis: explicit version-pinned public provenance of this ClaimVersion (Amendment v1.2 §6): the pinned field-6 Source record "Berglund, Tong, Kaufmann, Balesni, Cooper Stickland, Korbak & Evans, “The Reversal Curse: LLMs trained on ‘A is B’ fail to learn ‘B is A’,” ICLR 2024".