What Am I Missing? Question-Answering as Hidden State Probing
Test-time reasoning has become a significant field of study since the introduction of chain-of-thought reasoning in large language models (LLMs). However, the mechanisms of this reasoning process are still under-explored -- from the same input prompt, and even the same partial solution, LLMs can produce varied answers if sampled multiple times. We propose to leverage question-asking as an inference-time intervention that articulates information about the model's hidden state. To achieve that, we present a student-teacher setting where a student asks questions to a teacher. We train a probe on the student's hidden state before and after asking a question and find it is predictive of the tr...
| Authors | Chu Fei Luo, Samuel Dahan, Xiaodan Zhu |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 29 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 29 May 2026 |
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