Mechanisms of Introspective Awareness
Recent work has shown that LLMs can sometimes detect when steering vectors are injected into their residual stream and identify the injected concept -- a phenomenon termed "introspective awareness." We investigate the mechanisms underlying this capability in open-weights models. First, we find that it is behaviorally robust: models detect injected steering vectors at moderate rates with 0% false positives across diverse prompts and dialogue formats. Notably, this capability emerges specifically from post-training; we show that preference optimization algorithms like DPO can elicit it, but standard supervised finetuning does not. We provide evidence that detection cannot be explained by si...
| Authors | Uzay Macar, Li Yang, Atticus Wang et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 22 March 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 10 June 2026 |
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