The Granularity Axis: A Micro-to-Macro Latent Direction for Social Roles in Language Models
Large language models (LLMs) are routinely prompted to take on social roles ranging from individuals to institutions, yet it remains unclear whether their internal representations encode the granularity of such roles, from micro-level individual experience to macro-level organizational, institutional, or national reasoning. We show that they do. We define a contrast-based Granularity Axis as the difference between mean macro- and micro-role hidden states. In Qwen3-8B, this axis aligns with the principal axis (PC1) of the role representation space at cosine 0.972 and accounts for 52.6% of its variance, indicating that granularity is the dominant geometric axis organizing prompted social ro...
| Authors | Chonghan Qin, Xiachong Feng, Ziyun Song et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 7 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 7 May 2026 |
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