World Properties without World Models: Distributional Associations and the Interpretation of Decoding Results from Language Models
A growing literature shows that variables can be linearly decoded from the activations of large language models (LLMs). These range from properties of the world, such as the locations of cities and the lifetimes of historical figures, to emotions and pain. Such findings are often taken as evidence that language models go beyond surface text statistics and form internal models of the world. We show that static word embeddings (fixed, context-insensitive representations learned from corpus statistics) of the same or matched stimuli support much of the same decoding. Across four published cases (place, time, pain and emotion), static vectors predict coordinates and year of death (R^2 = 0.42-...
| Authors | Elan Barenholtz |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 4 March 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 6 October 2026 |
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