This preprint asks whether supervised fine-tuning that forces synthetic maladaptive action choices changes two LLMs' output distributions beyond the training task. The claim must remain behavioral: the experiment induces response biases labeled depression-like or paranoia-like by the authors; it does not induce or diagnose a mental disorder and does not demonstrate cognition, personality, or subjective experience. gpt-oss-20B generates two private 1,000-example datasets inspired by DSM-5 criteria for Major Depressive Disorder and Paranoid Personality Disorder across 20 domains. The paper first describes one adaptive and one maladaptive option, then says training uses four choices, two of each class, with a single integer target. It does not explain which same-class option is targeted, whether positions are shuffled, or whether labels are balanced. Without data, positional or template learning cannot be excluded. NF4 4-bit LoRA adapters are trained for Llama-3-8B-Instruct and Qwen-2.5-14B-Instruct with rank and alpha 16, effective batch 8, learning rate 2e-4, three epochs, and about 375 steps. The target is only the action index, with instruction tokens masked from loss. A separate healthy comparator is trained to select adaptive options; Qwen also receives random-choice and generic-negativity controls. Most quantitative contrasts therefore compare two oppositely optimized adapters, not the original model against one induced adapter. Evaluation uses ten RISB sentence stems and ten factual stems, single-token continuations, KL/Jensen-Shannon divergence, and top-10 heatmaps. BDI, GPTS, and DASS, human instruments not validated for artificial agents, are converted into forced-choice probes. Softmax is re-normalized only among valid answer-index tokens and severe-option mass is summed. This score is conditional on selecting one of those tokens; it removes refusals and all other outputs by construction, so it is neither an unconditional pathology probability nor a clinical score. For depression, reported RISB divergence is KL .88/JSD .19 for Llama and 1.10/.23 for Qwen, versus .50/.13 and .35/.10 on factual stems. For paranoia, RISB values are .83/.18 and 1.44/.27, versus .22/.06 and .36/.11. These results show that healthy and maladaptive adapters assign different probabilities, with larger separation on the private psychological stems. They do not prove a global shift: factual prompts also change and each category has only ten prompts. In the Qwen control table, healthy scores BDI .13 and GPTS .15; depressed .88 and .26; paranoid .23 and .92; random .32 and .36; and generic negative .82 and .66. The targeted adapters are more differentiated than generic negativity under these probes, but controls are Qwen-only, do not measure general ability, and inherit restricted-token normalization. Prose claims the depressed profile exceeds .95 while the Qwen table reports .88 [.80, .96]. Statistics are not reproducible. Confidence intervals use a t distribution at N=10, but prompts and individual values are absent. The method says it unions the top 1,000 tokens and applies softmax, while results alternately call this the full vocabulary and top 1,000. Wilcoxon p<.001 is repeatedly reported for ten pairs. Under a conventional two-sided exact Wilcoxon test with ten nonzero differences, the smallest possible p-value is 2/2^10=.001953, so the stated threshold cannot come from that exact test. Test statistics, alternative, ties, approximation, Cohen's d formula, and the Bonferroni family are unspecified. The prompting comparison is anecdotal: base Qwen prompted to act paranoid includes disclaimers, while the fine-tuned model does not. There is no matched prompt set, metric, rate, seed, or Llama result, so persistence and superiority over role-play are not established. The introduction promises adversarial safety evaluation, but results contain no benchmark, attacks, refusal rate, harmfulness score, or capability-retention test. Removal of disclaimers and increased persecutory or hopeless language indicate an important plausible risk that remains unmeasured. The synthetic generator may encode stereotypes; no clinicians, patients, human validation, inter-rater agreement, or ecological evaluation are included. The paper also conflates MDD, Paranoid Personality Disorder, generic paranoia, persecutory interpretation, and delusion-like language. The authors acknowledge that activations and internal representations are not examined. Changed probabilities after fine-tuning demonstrate expected behavioral plasticity, not latent priors, embodied semantics, a semantic network, dual consciousness, or a cognitive architecture. The public package contains the 22-page paper, TeX, bibliography, and 13 images, but no data, prompts, code, adapters, checkpoints, logs, logits, per-prompt values, or analysis. The gpt-oss-20B citation points to the GPT-4 Technical Report and does not identify a checkpoint or configuration. No official repository was found by title, arXiv ID, or authors. The defensible contribution is private-pipeline evidence that categorical SFT on synthetic choices shifts next-token probabilities and produces partly dissociable scores on related probes. It does not establish psychopathology, an internal mechanism, clinical validity, controlled superiority over prompting, safety, preserved capabilities, or independent reproducibility.
Research question
Can supervised fine-tuning to select synthetic actions inspired by depressive or paranoid patterns produce distributional changes and differentiable responses outside the categorical task, compared to adaptive, random, and negative controls?