When Is a Steerable Concept Representation Real? Measurement Confounds in a Cross-Family Audit of Neuroscience Parallels in LLMs
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly reported to exhibit human-like neural and cognitive signatures, including concept cells, mental number lines, and cognitive maps. These claims often rely on linear probing and activation steering applied to a single model, yet both methods are highly sensitive to measurement choices. A reported parallel may therefore reflect the model, the measurement procedure, or both. We audit four representative neuroscience-inspired paradigms across 17 models from five families, spanning $0.6$B to $72$B parameters. Our main experiment examines the causal steerability of concept directions. With raw activation units and a fixed layer and coefficient, steer...
| Authors | Yuqi Wu, Shengming Zhao, Jie Chen |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 8 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 8 August 2026 |
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 17 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.