上下文—答案元模型:在首个答案 token 之前预测 LLM 激活
Context--Answer Metamodels: Forecasting LLM Activations Before the First Answer Token
Tommy He, Thomas Jiralerspong
AI 速读 基于摘要
作者提出并训练上下文—答案元模型,用阅读上下文时产生的激活序列预测答案激活的均值池化结果及其分布,从而在生成首个答案 token 前对模型行为做可扩展预测。
cs.LG · cs.AI
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Under stochastic decoding, a single context can elicit many different answers from a language model. Characterizing this variation typically requires many expensive autoregressive rollouts, each revealing only one realization. We ask whether the activations produced while reading the context can directly forecast the model's rollout activations. We train context--answer metamodels that map a context activation sequence to point or distribution forecasts of mean-pooled answer activations. We find that (i) the four metamodel families we study forecast mean-pooled answer activations with high fidelity, and the distribution metamodels also capture rollout variability; (ii) performance improves as the training set grows to 500,000 prompts, and the metamodels generalize zero-shot to out-of-domain datasets; (iii) their forecasts retain behavior-predictive signal; and (iv) context activations from Qwen2.5 predict mean-pooled answer activations from Qwen3.5 and Gemma 4, suggesting that activation forecasts can transfer across models. Together, these results suggest that context activation traces can support scalable forecasts of behaviors in LLM answers before the first answer token is generated.