Related papers: Emergent Introspective Awareness in Large Language…

Can large language models detect and report their own internal states? A number of studies have argued that the answer to this question is yes. We argue, based on lessons from human metacognition research, that this conclusion may be…

Can large language models introspect, that is, accurately detect perturbations to their own internal states? We systematically investigate this question using activation steering in Meta-Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct. First, we show that the binary…

There has been recent interest in whether large language models (LLMs) can introspect about their own internal states. Such abilities would make LLMs more interpretable, and also validate the use of standard introspective methods in…

Self-consciousness, the introspection of one's existence and thoughts, represents a high-level cognitive process. As language models advance at an unprecedented pace, a critical question arises: Are these models becoming self-conscious?…

Tracking the internal states of large language models across conversations is important for safety, interpretability, and model welfare, yet current methods are limited. Linear probes and other white-box methods compress high-dimensional…

Humans acquire knowledge by observing the external world, but also by introspection. Introspection gives a person privileged access to their current state of mind (e.g., thoughts and feelings) that is not accessible to external observers.…

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit compelling linguistic behaviour, and sometimes offer self-reports, that is to say statements about their own nature, inner workings, or behaviour. In humans, such reports are often attributed to a…

We uncover a latent capacity for introspection in a Qwen 32B model, demonstrating that the model can detect when concepts have been injected into its earlier context and identify which concept was injected. While the model denies injection…

Can language models (LMs) learn to faithfully describe their internal computations? Are they better able to describe themselves than other models? We study the extent to which LMs' privileged access to their own internals can be leveraged…

Large language model (LLM) systems suffer from the models' unstable ability to generate valid and factual content, resulting in hallucination generation. Current hallucination detection methods heavily rely on out-of-model information…

Introspection is a foundational cognitive ability, but its mechanism is not well understood. Recent work has shown that AI models can introspect. We study the mechanism of this introspection. We first extensively replicate Lindsey (2025)'s…

Self-reflection -- the ability of a large language model (LLM) to revisit, evaluate, and revise its own reasoning -- has recently emerged as a powerful behavior enabled by reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR). While…

Language models are pretrained as passive predictors with no incentive to model the consequences of their own outputs. Post-training changes this: a model producing its own responses can benefit from recognizing that it is on-policy. We…

Large language models (LLMs) can sometimes report the strategies they actually use to solve tasks, yet at other times seem unable to recognize those strategies that govern their behavior. This suggests a limited degree of metacognition -…

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit emergent behaviors suggestive of human-like reasoning. While recent work has identified structured conceptual representations within these models, it remains unclear whether they functionally rely on…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive mathematical reasoning capabilities, yet their performance remains brittle to minor variations in problem description and prompting strategy. Furthermore, reasoning is vulnerable to…

How do large language models (LLMs) obtain their answers? The ability to explain and control an LLM's reasoning process is key for reliability, transparency, and future model developments. We propose SelfIE (Self-Interpretation of…

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly exhibit behaviors suggesting awareness of their evaluation context, often adapting their reasoning strategies in benchmark settings. Prior work has shown that such evaluation awareness can distort…

Large language models must balance their weight-encoded knowledge with in-context information from prompts to generate accurate responses. This paper investigates this interplay by analyzing how models of varying capacities within the same…

Large language models sometimes produce structured, first-person descriptions that explicitly reference awareness or subjective experience. To better understand this behavior, we investigate one theoretically motivated condition under which…