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Emergent Response Planning in LLM (arxiv.org)
1 point by Jimmc414 on Feb 12, 2025 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Even though a language model is trained only to guess the next word, its hidden signals carry a rough plan for the whole answer—length, content, and confidence. Simple probes can read these plans off, and they get clearer as models grow larger.

Abstract · Emergent Response Planning in LLMs

In this work, we argue that large language models (LLMs), though trained to predict only the next token, exhibit emergent planning behaviors: $\textbf{their hidden representations encode future outputs beyond the next token}$. Through simple probing, we demonstrate that LLM prompt representations encode global attributes of their entire responses, including $\textit{structure attributes}$ (e.g., response length, reasoning steps), $\textit{content attributes}$ (e.g., character choices in storywriting, multiple-choice answers at the end of response), and $\textit{behavior attributes}$ (e.g., answer confidence, factual consistency). In addition to identifying response planning, we explore how it scales with model size across tasks and how it evolves during generation. The findings that LLMs plan ahead for the future in their hidden representations suggest potential applications for improving transparency and generation control.

Zhichen Dong, Zhanhui Zhou, Zhixuan Liu, Chao Yang, Chaochao Lu
arXiv:2502.06258 · cs.CL, cs.LG · submitted Feb 10, 2025 · updated Aug 4, 2025
abstract · pdf · html · Published at ICML 2025. Code available at: https://github.com/niconi19/Emergent-Response-Planning-in-LLMs

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