arXiv:2610.20179v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Probes on activation vectors are widely used to detect misbehavior in language models, but their success relies on the assumption that models cannot...
arXiv:2607. 25907v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Activation steering controls model behavior by editing internal activations at inference time.
arXiv:2605.30381v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: When a language model is fine-tuned to produce systematically incorrect responses, does this training leave a structured, linearly recoverabl...
The study investigates how task context reshapes the roles of shared attention heads in large language models. By applying identical graph facts and measuring interventions on attention heads and downstream activations, the authors show that task changes redistribute influence across five open‑weight models, causing the same heads to respond to different facts and affect later components differently. Linear response maps before and after activation edits reveal significant reductions in prediction error, indicating that task context alters both the facts processed and the downstream impact of shared components.
arXiv:2607. 03598v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When a person shares something with a language model, the model often answers the surface of the message rather than what the sender was doing by sending it: share a finished project and it critiques the code; share a raw late-night line and it runs a wellness check.
arXiv:2608.21664v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Safe deployment of increasingly capable models will likely come to rely on latent-space monitoring as a complement to behavioral evaluations, especiall...
Whether large language models (LLMs) can control their own internal representations matters for both machine metacognition and AI safety. A recent study applied neurofeedback to LLMs and claimed that...
arXiv:2607. 20379v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Natural-language autoencoders score explanations of hidden activations by reconstruction: an explanation is deemed faithful if the activation can be regenerated from it.
The paper investigates whether large language models (LLMs) can control their own internal representations, a question relevant to machine metacognition and AI safety. Previous work claimed such control using neurofeedback, but the targets were not privileged, allowing third‑party inference from prompts. By redesigning the paradigm to enforce privileged access—mirroring human neurofeedback experiments—the authors find that LLMs fail to reliably control these internal representations, indicating that earlier claims may have relied on superficial mechanisms.
The paper investigates how language models decide between contextual information and their internal memory when the two conflict. By estimating "authority directions" from agreement prompts and swapping these directions between matched prompts, the authors show that such interventions can reproduce 30–68% of the shift in source choice across Qwen, Llama, and OLMo models. Cross‑task experiments reveal that authority directions learned on one task transfer only modestly (≈9%) to another, indicating that authority computations are largely task‑specific.
arXiv:2608. 19893v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Where does the novelty a base language model produces with no task come from, and what can an LLM judge of a long stream actually see?
The paper questions whether large language models (LLMs) truly introspect by critiquing recent studies that claim they can detect and report their internal states. It proposes two necessary conditions for genuine introspection: privileged access to internal representations and second‑order computation that distinguishes from first‑order task performance. Re‑examining two existing paradigms, the authors find that apparent introspective abilities can be explained by input‑based classifiers or generic anomaly detection, concluding that current evidence does not support metacognitive monitoring in LLMs.