Planting a Latent Variable in Natural-Looking Text: a More Realistic Test of Belief States in LLMs and Their Link to Concept Geometry

Abstract:LLMs are thought to track "belief states," i.e., running probability distributions over the latent variables that govern language (Shai et al., 2024; Sarfati et al., 2026), but so far this has only been comprehensively demonstrated on toy synthetic data and in a few isolated case studies. It has also never been empirically connected to the geometry of LLM features (the concepts interpretability finds in model activations). In this work, we plant a controllable latent variable inside natural-looking text. An LLM teacher writes ordinary text while we "subliminally" steer it along one of K = 8 unrelated sparse autoencoder directions at each token, with the active directions following a ring-shaped Markov chain. A small transformer model trained on this corpus does indeed track the Bayesian posterior belief about our planted latent variable. Moreover, it also arranges the 8 states themselves on a ring, in the exact order of the Markov chain, which is supporting evidence that a concept's geometry can be formed by the statistical dynamics of the latent variable behind it.

Computation and Language (cs.CL)

arXiv:2608.26887 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2608.26887v1 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.26887 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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