Formalizing Latent Thoughts: Four Axioms of Thought Representation in LLMs
We introduce an axiomatic evaluation framework for latent thought representations in LLMs, comprising metrics that are independent of downstream benchmark scores and reveal representational failures that benchmark accuracy masks. Existing evaluations conflate representation quality with model capacity. Therefore, failures cannot be attributed to the representation rather than to the model that processes it. We formalize four functional axioms (Causality, Minimality, Separability, and Stability) and define a quantitative measure for each, computed directly on the representation independently of downstream accuracy. We audit open-weight LLMs across 23 reasoning tasks (e.g., Spatial Reasonin...
| Authors | Fahd Seddik, Fatemeh Fard |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 7 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 7 May 2026 |
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