Belief-reality separation lives in routing over a shared value slot in language models
Capable language models hold what a character believes apart from what is true: told "Anna believes the cup is blue; in reality it is red," they answer blue about Anna and red about the world. Where in the computation does that separation live? We show it rests on two separable mechanisms at two positions. A generic value slot binds the attributed value. A router at the query position selects which frame, the character's belief or reality, a query reads out. Two routes fill the slot: an asserted belief, whose value the text supplies, binds in directly; a derived belief, whose value must be inferred from what the character could see, arrives by a visibility-gated lookback. A subspace train...
| Authors | Oliver Steele, Jiangtao Wen, Yuxing Han |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 11 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 20 July 2026 |
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