Instructions Shape Production of Language, not Processing
Instructions trigger a production-centered mechanism in language models. Through a cognitively inspired lens that separates language processing and production, we reveal this mechanism as an asymmetry between the two stages by probing task-specific information layer-wise across five binary judgment tasks. Specifically, we measure how instruction tokens shape information both when sample tokens, the input under evaluation, are processed and when output tokens are produced. Across prompting variations, task-specific information in sample tokens remains largely stable and correlates only weakly with behavior, whereas the same information in output tokens varies substantially and correlates s...
| Authors | Andreas Waldis, Leshem Choshen, Yufang Hou et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 11 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 13 May 2026 |
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