arXiv:2608. 07528v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Linear probes detect corrupted context in language models with near-perfect accuracy, yet this does not translate into reliable failure prediction.
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The paper investigates in-context binding errors in language models, showing that a linear probe can recover correct entity bindings from frozen hidden states even when the model outputs incorrect bindings. Across 16 checkpoints, the probe’s accuracy on failure cases surpasses a baseline by about 0.196, and a probe‑based score improves failure detection over the model’s confidence by 0.079 AUROC. Steering the residual stream toward the probe‑decoded binding further boosts accuracy by an average of 0.168 across eight models.
arXiv:2606. 06635v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Failures in language model reasoning emerge through distinct processes that leave identifiable signatures in the reasoning trace.
arXiv:2606. 05145v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When post-trained language models fail on reasoning problems, the common test-time-scaling response is to spend more compute on additional attempts, and the failed traces play no further role.
arXiv:2608. 11415v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models are being proposed as agents in scientific workflows, in domains where no downstream verifier exists.
The paper investigates the reliability of tool‑using agents, focusing on two failure modes: selecting the wrong tool and constructing incorrect arguments. It introduces a correct‑invocation rate metric to distinguish these errors and evaluates five open‑weight models on multi‑step tasks up to depth 8, finding that by depth 6 about 70% of a model’s clean‑context capability is lost due to earlier mistakes. The study reveals that exact‑match scoring against a fixed gold trajectory forces severity and recovery parameters to extreme values, and proposes a conditional‑on‑state scoring remedy that yields more realistic severity estimates.
arXiv:2608. 03291v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning improves large language model (LLM) performance while also providing an observable interface to the model's reasoning process.