What's the plan? Metrics for implicit planning in LLMs and their application to rhyme generation

ICLR 2026 Conference Submission21127 Authors

Keywords: implicit planning, LLM, rhyming, metrics

TL;DR: quantitative measures of implicit planning in LLMs, with a case study in rhymed poetry generation

Abstract:

Prior work suggests that language models, while trained on next token prediction, show implicit planning behavior: they may select the next token in preparation to a predicted future token, such as a likely rhyming word, as supported by a prior qualitative study of Claude 3.5 Haiku using a cross-layer transcoder.
We propose much simpler techniques for assessing implicit planning in language models. With case studies on rhyme poetry generation and question answering, we demonstrate that our methodology easily scales to many models.
Across models, we find that the generated rhyme (e.g. "-ight") or answer to a question ("whale")
can be manipulated by steering at the end of the preceding line with a vector, affecting the generation of intermediate tokens leading up to the rhyme or answer word.
We show that implicit planning is a universal mechanism, present in smaller models than previously thought, starting from 1B parameters.
Our methodology offers a widely applicable direct way to study implicit planning abilities of LLMs.
More broadly, understanding planning abilities of language models can inform decisions in AI safety and control.

Primary Area: interpretability and explainable AI

Submission Number: 21127