Investigating Linear Probe Robustness to Linguistic Register, Medical Specialty, and Corpus Shifts in Medical QA

Abstract:Linear classifiers trained on hidden states of a large language model (LLM), linear probes, can flag factual errors from a single forward pass. Geometrically, that implies that true and false statements separate along a stable direction in hidden state space, i.e., the truth direction. Prior work disagrees on whether this generalises across input shifts, but the disagreement is hard to interpret because cross-dataset probe transfer experiments confound several kinds of input change at once. We isolate three such variables in medical question-answering (QA): writing style (register), domain (medical specialty), and corpus (dataset). We build a benchmark using 500 MedQA entries, each rewritten into four styles (textbook, patient, clinical note, colloquial), annotated with clinical specialty, and grouped with two other exam corpora, MedMCQA and MMLU-medical, for cross-dataset evaluation. Probing four open-weight LLMs (2--8B), we find that the truth direction is largely robust to writing style (mean $\Delta_\text{register} \approx 0.10$ AUROC on held-out facts) and to medical specialty ($\Delta_\text{specialty} \approx 0.03$), but degrades unevenly across corpora: by $0.12$ AUROC on MMLU-medical and by $0.21$ on MedMCQA, roughly twice the register gap. The register result replicates with a second generator and carries over to human-written patient questions. The truth direction is therefore largely stable within the medical domain but breaks under some corpus shifts, and question format does not explain the break, which suggests that the signal a linear probe recovers is partly bound to dataset structure rather than to medical knowledge alone.

Accepted to EMNLP 2026 (Main Conference). 9 pages, 4 figures (main text); 28 pages total, including appendix. Code and data: this https URL

Computation and Language (cs.CL); Machine Learning (cs.LG)

arXiv:2609.01361 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2609.01361v1 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.01361 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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