Related papers: Stories in Space: In-Context Learning Trajectories…

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…

Theory of Mind (ToM) reasoning with Large Language Models (LLMs) requires inferring how people's implicit, evolving beliefs shape what they seek and how they act under uncertainty -- especially in high-stakes settings such as disaster…

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as agents that interact with users and with the world. To do so successfully, LLMs must construct representations of the world and form probabilistic beliefs about them. To provide…

Large language models (LLMs) can be controlled at inference time through prompts (in-context learning) and internal activations (activation steering). Different accounts have been proposed to explain these methods, yet their common goal of…

We study how large language models (LLMs) ``think'' through their representation space. We propose a novel geometric framework that models an LLM's reasoning as flows -- embedding trajectories evolving where logic goes. We disentangle…

We study the in-context learning dynamics of large language models (LLMs) using three instrumental learning tasks adapted from cognitive psychology. We find that LLMs update their beliefs in an asymmetric manner and learn more from…

Large Language Models (LLMs) possess general world knowledge but often struggle to generate precise predictions in structured, domain-specific contexts such as simulations. These limitations arise from their inability to ground their broad,…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been shown to organize the representations of input sequences into straighter neural trajectories in their deep layers, which has been hypothesized to facilitate next-token prediction via linear…

Understanding the internal mechanisms of large language models (LLMs) remains a challenging and complex endeavor. Even fundamental questions, such as how fine-tuning affects model behavior, often require extensive empirical evaluation. In…

This work characterizes large language models' chain-of-thought generation as a structured trajectory through representation space. We show that mathematical reasoning traverses functionally ordered, step-specific subspaces that become…

People acquire concepts through rich physical and social experiences and use them to understand and navigate the world. In contrast, large language models (LLMs), trained solely through next-token prediction on text, exhibit strikingly…

Large language models (LLMs) trained on huge corpora of text datasets demonstrate intriguing capabilities, achieving state-of-the-art performance on tasks they were not explicitly trained for. The precise nature of LLM capabilities is often…

Accurate prediction of human behavior is crucial for AI systems to effectively support real-world applications, such as autonomous robots anticipating and assisting with human tasks. Real-world scenarios frequently present challenges such…

Large language models (LLMs) form implicit beliefs (posteriors over latent variables) from prompts, but we lack a mechanistic account of how these beliefs are encoded in representation space, how they update with new evidence, and how…

Scaling large language models (LLMs) leads to an emergent capacity to learn in-context from example demonstrations. Despite progress, theoretical understanding of this phenomenon remains limited. We argue that in-context learning relies on…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in reasoning and prediction across different domains. Yet, their ability to infer temporal regularities from structured behavioral data remains underexplored. This paper…

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly tasked with strategic decision-making under incomplete information, such as in negotiation and policymaking. While LLMs can excel at many such tasks, they also fail in ways that are poorly…

Large language models (LLMs) can learn from a few demonstrations provided at inference time. We study this in-context learning phenomenon through the lens of Gaussian Processes (GPs). We build controlled experiments where models observe…

Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to acquire sequence-level planning abilities during training, yet their planning behavior exhibited at inference time often appears short-sighted and inconsistent with these capabilities. We…

Beliefs form the foundation of human cognition and decision-making, guiding our actions and social connections. A model encapsulating beliefs and their interrelationships is crucial for understanding their influence on our actions. However,…