From Texts to Scores: Tracing the Emergence of Essay Quality Representations in Large Language Models
Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have substantially transformed Automated Essay Scoring (AES), yet the internal mechanisms underlying LLM-based scoring remain poorly understood. In this work, we systematically analyze the hidden representations of eight LLMs across two English essay datasets (ASAP++, CSEE) and one Portuguese dataset (ENEM). Using linear probing, cross-prompt generalization, dimensionality reduction, and neuron-level analyses, we find consistent evidence that essay quality information is encoded in a linearly accessible form within LLM representations. These representations emerge progressively across layers, remain robust across prompting strategies, and pa...
| Authors | Jiaxu Zuo, Mu You, Kaixin Lan et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 18 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 18 June 2026 |
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