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When Decodability Is Not Enough: Logical Validity Representations, Behavioral Dissociation, and Causal Tests in Language Models

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TL;DR - Hidden states in five open-weight transformers often made logical validity highly decodable even when model answers were near chance. Weak causal effects from probe-derived interventions show that encoding validity, expressing it in outputs, and causally using it are distinct capabilities.

  • Validity remained strongly decodable across held-out templates, semantic domains, and inference families.
  • Validity information was also highly decodable in behaviorally incorrect examples where correctness-conditioned evaluation was applicable.
  • Exhaustive leave-one-out tests identified limits to how broadly these representations generalized.
  • Intervening along learned validity directions produced only weak, nonspecific effects relative to random controls.

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When Decodability Is Not Enough: Logical Validity Representations, Behavioral Dissociation, and Causal Tests in Language Models

arXiv cs.CL Smitha Muthya Sudheendra, Jaideep Srivastava 2026-09-02 arXiv:2609.02438
Public signals Semantic Scholar citations 0 · Semantic Scholar influential citations 0
Providers: Hugging Face · N/A OpenAlex · N/A Publisher · N/A Semantic Scholar · Citations 0 · Influential citations 0 X · N/A Fetched 2026-09-25 14:24:36.597775 UTC

TL;DR - Hidden states in five open-weight transformers often made logical validity highly decodable even when model answers were near chance. Weak causal effects from probe-derived interventions show that encoding validity, expressing it in outputs, and causally using it are distinct capabilities.

  • Validity remained strongly decodable across held-out templates, semantic domains, and inference families.
  • Validity information was also highly decodable in behaviorally incorrect examples where correctness-conditioned evaluation was applicable.
  • Exhaustive leave-one-out tests identified limits to how broadly these representations generalized.
  • Intervening along learned validity directions produced only weak, nonspecific effects relative to random controls.
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