StateSwap: Probing Support-Elimination Hidden States in Multiple-Choice Questions
Large language models often answer the same multiple-choice question inconsistently when it is posed under support-oriented and elimination-oriented framings. We investigate whether these discrepancies arise from different internal representations induced by the two framings. We introduce a dual-framing protocol with minimally varied prompts that use either support- or elimination-oriented framing while keeping the evaluation target fixed. To probe the internal computation, we append an untrained special token, [STATE], and treat its residual-stream activation as an intervention interface. Across both models, the two framings induce separable [STATE] activations concentrated in intermedia...
| Authors | Chao Gao, Haijiang Liu, Qiyuan Li et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 1 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 7 September 2026 |
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