ParaScopes: What do Language Models Activations Encode About Future Text?

ICLR 2026 Conference Submission25101 Authors

Keywords: ai, language models, llms, interpretability, planning, probes

TL;DR: We try different ways of decoding language model residuals

Abstract: Interpretability studies in language models often investigate forward-looking representations of activations. However, as language models become capable of doing ever longer time horizon tasks, methods for understanding activations often remain limited to testing specific concepts or tokens. We develop a framework of Residual Stream Decoders as a method of probing model activations for paragraph-scale and document-scale plans. We test several methods and find information can be decoded equivalent to 5+ tokens of future context in small models. These results lay the groundwork for better monitoring of language models and better understanding how they might encode longer-term planning information.

Primary Area: interpretability and explainable AI

Submission Number: 25101