Counterfactual Likelihood Tests for Indirect Influence in Private Reasoning Channels
Reasoning systems increasingly separate intermediate computation into private and public channels, creating evaluation cases that look similar in transcripts: independent co-derivation, direct access to private content, and indirect influence through public communication. This paper presents a counterfactual likelihood test for measuring influence between private reasoning channels. The method replaces an upstream private block with a length-matched donor block, holds the public token sequence and downstream target fixed, and measures the downstream target's negative-log-likelihood shift. On a 7B role-channel reasoning model used for validation, textual probes are unreliable: raw n-gram o...
| Authors | Alexander Boesgaard Lorup |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 18 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 18 May 2026 |
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