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...
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.
By Shashwat Singh, Tal Linzen, Shauli Ravfogel
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...
By Davide Baldelli, Robyn Kozierok, Mirko Bronzi, Damiano Fornasiere
Probes on activation vectors are widely used to detect misbehavior in language models, but their success relies on the assumption that models cannot control what their activations encode. Humans can l...
The paper introduces a new method for measuring metacognitive abilities in large language models (LLMs) without relying on self-reports, instead testing how well models can use knowledge of their internal states. Using two experimental paradigms, the authors find that recent frontier LLMs can assess and use their own confidence when answering factual and reasoning questions, and can anticipate and appropriately employ the answers they would give. The study also shows that these abilities are limited in resolution, context-dependent, differ qualitatively from human metacognition, and vary across models with similar capabilities, suggesting post‑training processes influence metacognitive development.
By Christopher Ackerman
arXiv:2606. 05976v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent works show that LLM agents struggle to correct errors in their own reasoning traces, despite their ability to correct errors from external sources.
By Kuan-Yen Chen, Fang-Yi Su, Shih-Yen Lin, Bao Li, Jung-Hsien Chiang