Language Model Activations Inhabit Privileged Error-Correcting Basins
Language models exhibit remarkable robustness, continuing to produce coherent text even when their activations are perturbed by interventions like linear steering. We hypothesize that this robustness is a result of passive dynamics, i.e., constraining mechanisms in the forward pass that funnel activations toward "good" regions that produce coherent outputs. To investigate these hypothesized error-correcting mechanisms, we probe the geometry of language model activation space by observing the action of model layers on low-dimensional curves. In doing so, we discover that model activations occur within a cluster of distinct attracting basins, which differentiate natural activations geometri...
| Authors | Matthew Finlayson, Francisco Pernice, Eric Todd et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 3 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 3 October 2026 |
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