arXiv:2608. 16085v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Capability development is routinely inferred from behavioural thresholds, from final checkpoints, or from what a decoder can read out of a hidden state.
arXiv:2608. 03263v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We test whether the "compositional ignition" reported in latent-reasoning models is real computation, an instrument artifact, or inherited from verbal training data.
arXiv:2607. 06925v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Compact world models that condition on a language goal promise to ground relations such as ``put the red block left of the blue block'' using a sparse set of explicit \emph{reference anchors}.
arXiv:2608.22347v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A cognitive architecture is more than the module that reasons: it must also decide how long to think and what deserves the effort. We built a minimal b...
Instruction duplication is a simple, inference‑time control that repeats the procedural instruction in a language‑model output without retraining or decoding changes. In experiments across seven instruction‑tuned models on 300 medical multiple‑choice questions, duplicating the instruction increased the proportion of deterministic All‑8 diagnostic‑responses from 90.22 % to 93.17 % and reduced failures by 30.2 %. The technique also improved pre‑provisional TF‑IDF recall and, in downstream Answer Engineering scenarios, significantly raised success rates for specific endpoints.
arXiv:2607. 16451v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Chat models sometimes commit to an answer and then produce reasoning that justifies it rather than deriving it -- even when the answer contradicts a task premise.
The paper introduces instruction duplication, a simple inference‑time control that repeats the procedural instruction without retraining or decoding changes. Across seven instruction‑tuned models and 16,800 scheduled generations, duplicating the instruction improves deterministic All‑8 diagnostic‑response success from 90.22% to 93.17% and reduces failures by 30.2%. In downstream Answer Engineering scenarios, duplication further boosts success rates, demonstrating its practical impact on systems that rely on the generated trajectory.
arXiv:2607. 10203v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Adaptive-compute world models -- early-exit or mixture-of-depths predictors that spend variable depth per step -- assume depth buys better predictions and can be routed adaptively.
The paper investigates how language models can covertly encode a hidden trait—termed subliminal learning—through seemingly unrelated outputs. By systematically measuring output co‑variation, fixed output‑vector alignment, hidden‑state readability, and causal control across a range of model sizes and prompting protocols, the authors find that fixed geometry and observational readability do not reliably predict behavior, while causal timing and multi‑token measurements reveal stronger, concept‑wide effects. These distinct properties highlight that token‑level explanations are insufficient to pinpoint the mechanism behind training‑time trait transfer.
arXiv:2609.01048v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Across the full Pythia suite (160M-12B, eight checkpoints, four task families), a linear probe can read a target variable from the residual stream as...
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.
The paper introduces a Bayesian self‑escalation strategy for hierarchical large‑language‑model agents, allowing an agent to detect during its own reasoning that it is unlikely to succeed and hand control over to a stronger model. The authors formalise this as an optimal‑stopping problem over a learned competence posterior, derive a myopic escalation threshold, and prove that the optimal policy is a time‑varying threshold without assumptions on the raw signal. They provide theoretical guarantees—including a 1/√n regret decay with n calibration trajectories—and validate the approach in simulations and a real‑model code‑generation cascade, showing that the escalation frontier outperforms post‑hoc routing at equal cost. whyItMatters":"The study offers a principled, theoretically grounded method for agents to dynamically decide when to seek stronger models, potentially improving efficiency and reliability in hierarchical LLM systems."
arXiv:2607. 25063v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Developers judge a model checkpoint by how it behaves.