A 0.6B language model consistently answers YES to 1,200 logical tests, yet its behavior shows no discrimination. Linear probes reveal the correct verdict with high AUC (0.96) and transfer to unseen structures, but a single scalar readout fails due to a saturated decision threshold offset by +4.6 σ. Adjusting this threshold restores behavior accuracy from 50 % to 81 % and improves higher‑scale models, demonstrating that miscalibrated readouts, not hidden knowledge loss, drive performance gaps.
arXiv:2607. 08456v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A model should refuse two different things: answers it would get wrong, and questions it should not answer at all, such as unanswerable ones or ones resting on a false premise.
The study examines how two small instruction‑tuned language models, Qwen2.5‑1.5B and Llama‑3.2‑1B, respond to user pushback on TriviaQA. When initially correct, the models flip to a wrong answer in about 42–43% of cases, with the effectiveness of different pushback styles varying by model. Attempts to decode capitulation from the pre‑response residual stream fail under a rigorous validation protocol, revealing overfitting and a measurement hazard that underestimates capitulation by 18–24 percentage points.
arXiv:2608. 13329v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A model that behaves differently when it senses it is being tested would undermine the evaluations we rely on, so recent work has sought to read that sense directly from a model's activations.
arXiv:2606. 30449v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Probes on model internals could help monitor agentic systems if they identify harmful text or tool actions before those actions are generated.
arXiv:2607. 28639v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We show that knowledge distillation in small instruction-tuned language models has asymmetric effects on bias.
arXiv:2608. 13591v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: High-confidence errors in large language models are often treated as evidence of fragile internal inference.
The study compares two ways of obtaining predictions from language models fine‑tuned on customer behavior: scoring answer tokens directly versus generating a written rationale and then scoring the resulting answer. Across 13 model‑domain cells covering four retail tasks, scored readouts consistently rank outcomes more accurately than generated readouts, with an AUC improvement ranging from 1.5 to 14.5 points. The authors also find that a third readout—eliciting a probability before any verdict—improves calibration but only when outcome rates are represented in training, and they recommend using generated rationales for interpretability while relying on scored heads for ranking.
arXiv:2607. 14111v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Can small language models detect and report on perturbations their own internal activations?
arXiv:2609.14754v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Causal claims about large language model (LLM) internals rest on measurements. Those might include a projection, a cosine, an ablation delta, or an i...
The paper investigates whether giving AI monitors access to the final answer improves their ability to verify reasoning. Using 237 step‑by‑step solutions to physics exam questions, the authors found that answer access mainly helps monitors detect inconsistencies with the final answer rather than independently checking the reasoning. Certification of the answer increased overall accuracy and error localization but reduced the ability to flag critical traces where the answer was correct but the reasoning was flawed.
arXiv:2606. 24952v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A central aspiration of mechanistic interpretability is controllability: if we know where a behavior is represented in a model's activations, we should be able to modify it.
arXiv:2607. 04223v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) reduces but does not eliminate hallucination, and existing detectors return a single answer-level score that does not indicate which sentence is unsupported, or why.