5 papers
Verbalizable Representations Form a Global Workspace in Language Models
Wes Gurnee, Nicholas Sofroniew, Adam Pearce +13
Out of everything the human brain processes, only a small fraction is consciously accessible, in the sense of being available for verbal report, deliberate control, and flexible re…
The Value Axis: Language Models Encode Whether They're on the Right Track
Nick Jiang, Isaac Kauvar, Jack Lindsey
We investigate whether language models internally track the value of their current trajectory, defined as the likelihood that their ongoing strategy will achieve their goals. Using…
Emotion Concepts and their Function in a Large Language Model
Nicholas Sofroniew, Isaac Kauvar, William Saunders +13
Large language models (LLMs) sometimes appear to exhibit emotional reactions. We investigate why this is the case in Claude Sonnet 4.5 and explore implications for alignment-releva…
When Models Manipulate Manifolds: The Geometry of a Counting Task
Wes Gurnee, Emmanuel Ameisen, Isaac Kauvar +4
Language models can perceive visual properties of text despite receiving only sequences of tokens-we mechanistically investigate how Claude 3.5 Haiku accomplishes one such task: li…
Policy-shaped prediction: avoiding distractions in model-based reinforcement learning
Miles Hutson, Isaac Kauvar, Nick Haber
Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) is a promising route to sample-efficient policy optimization. However, a known vulnerability of reconstruction-based MBRL consists of scen…