Contrastive Projection: Reading Transformer Internals by Differencing Logit Lenses

The paper introduces Contrastive Projection, a method that reads a transformer’s internal states by differencing the hidden states of two closely matched prompts and projecting the difference through the unembedding layer. This approach cancels shared components and highlights the distinctions between prompts, effectively revealing steering vectors and domain-to-domain mappings such as metaphor. The technique is training‑free, operates at every position, sub‑layer, and head, and has been validated across multiple architectures and initialization seeds.

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