Cognitive Maps in Large Language Models
It has long been proposed that animals construct cognitive maps to support flexible behavior in novel environments. We tested whether large language models form similar representations using relational reasoning tasks and causal "mosaic experiments" that manipulate internal activations in open-weight language models. Models beyond the ten-billion-parameter scale successfully inferred unstated relationships between entities and generalized to synthetic entity names. Across model and task families, models generated abstract representations of relational structure and combined them additively with representations of entity identity, binding entities to roles within that structure. Models sto...
| Authors | Albert Qin, Jonathan Cohen, Gautam Reddy |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 19 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 19 October 2026 |
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- 21 Oct 2026 Name: Cognitive Map in Large Language Models → Cognitive Maps in Large Language Models
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