Same Outcome, Different Readout: What Does a Steerable Valence Direction in LLMs Represent?
Claims about what an internal direction in an LLM represents need evidential constraints beyond an observer's prior beliefs about the system. Decodability and successful activation steering do not, by themselves, establish which construct the direction tracks. This gap is especially consequential for welfare-relevant interpretations, where a proposed functional state must be distinguished from correlated features of the extraction contrast. We treat the question as one of construct validity and study a good-bad outcome direction in a maze task, using controlled interventions that separate the realised outcome from the informational history through which it became known. Across multiple LL...
| Authors | Weihan Li, Xinlei Chen, Yuhan Song et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 19 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 13 October 2026 |
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