← 研踪 PaperTrailarXiv:2610.38296 · v1
Hidden Commitment: When Language Models Silently Pick a Side and How Steering Can Surface It
首次提交 2026-10-28 13:29
版本更新 2026-10-28 13:29
雷达观测 2026-10-30 10:22
摘要
Language-model answers are often treated as a visible record of the internal decision that produced them. We test this assumption in conflicting-context question answering, where two supplied documents support incompatible answers. A model can process the disagreement and still return a one-sided answer, even under prompts that ask it to disclose conflict. In Qwen 0.8B, hidden source commitment is captured by a residual source-choice direction whose sign tracks which document the answer uses. Sparse middle-layer MLP writers feed the same coordinate, and steering the coordinate changes the chosen source. A transfer run on Gemma 3 1B preserves the source-choice readout and sparse-write bridge under LLM-audited labels. Conflict disclosure follows a different pattern, appearing weaker, later-layer, and only partially steerable. These results support a practical monitoring strategy for retrieval systems that detects silent source commitment with residual readouts and pairs conflict-surfacing prompts with disclosure steering when the model has selected a side under disagreement.
作者备注：Presented at AI4Good @ ICML 2026
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v1 · 2026-10-28 13:29 · 最新观测版本
Hidden Commitment: When Language Models Silently Pick a Side and How Steering Can Surface It
Language-model answers are often treated as a visible record of the internal decision that produced them. We test this assumption in conflicting-context question answering, where two supplied documents support incompatible answers. A model can process the disagreement and still return a one-sided answer, even under prompts that ask it to disclose conflict. In Qwen 0.8B, hidden source commitment is captured by a residual source-choice direction whose sign tracks which document the answer uses. Sparse middle-layer MLP writers feed the same coordinate, and steering the coordinate changes the chosen source. A transfer run on Gemma 3 1B preserves the source-choice readout and sparse-write bridge under LLM-audited labels. Conflict disclosure follows a different pattern, appearing weaker, later-layer, and only partially steerable. These results support a practical monitoring strategy for retrieval systems that detects silent source commitment with residual readouts and pairs conflict-surfacing prompts with disclosure steering when the model has selected a side under disagreement.
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