Wrong Before Right: Late Rescue and Interface Failure in Aligned Language Models
We study how correctness is assembled inside aligned language models, not only whether the final answer is right. Using layer-wise difference-in-differences (DiD) trajectories over polarity-controlled minimal pairs, we identify the wrong-dip: in mid layers (25-90% depth), internal preference transiently commits to the incorrect answer and is rescued only by late-layer correction. We verify this causally with patchscope-style activation transplantation across 17 models, three families, and 64x scale (0.5B-32B). Four findings follow. (1) Alignment amplification of the causal wrong-dip is recipe-specific and emergent: it emerges at 3B in Qwen2.5, remains high, and peaks at 32B (paired t up t...
| Authors | Jiaqi Deng |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 6 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 6 July 2026 |
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