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Reading Between the Dots: Decoding Hidden Computation Across Filler Tokens (arxiv.org)
1 point by Luc 78 days ago | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Models can reason over meaningless filler like dots, leaving nothing readable in the output, but their internal signals still carry the steps. A decoder reading those signals, with no labels or training, recovered the values being computed 82–94% of the time across four task types.

Abstract · Reading Between the Dots: Decoding Hidden Computation across Filler Tokens

Frontier LLMs can perform multi-step reasoning over content-free filler tokens like dots or counting sequences, producing correct answers with no visible chain-of-thought (CoT). This is a limit case for behavioral oversight, where surface tokens carry no information about the underlying reasoning. But hidden from the output is not the same as hidden from us. On four task families (fact retrieval, parallel numeric composition, string manipulation, and in-context computation), two open-weights frontier models (DeepSeek V3, Kimi K2) compute over filler tokens in a legible way: attention routes the question through the filler region to the answer, logit-lens readouts show retrieved facts emerging early and their composition crystallizing in late layers, and KV-cache transplants at filler positions causally swap outputs between examples. We introduce an unsupervised decoding pipeline that takes only hidden states as input and recovers intermediate values with 82-94% accuracy (best LLM judge) across both models and all four tasks, without ground-truth labels or training. Even without a judge, the hidden values are already directly in the pipeline's top-2 tokens 35-85% of the time. The uplift persists whether the filler is prefilled or the model generates the filler itself. On these cleanly decomposable tasks, hidden computation that defeats behavioral CoT monitoring is readable from the residual stream, which suggests that monitorability is a property of the model's full computational trace rather than only its surface tokens.

Kaley Brauer, Claudio Mayrink Verdun, Samuel Marks
arXiv:2607.03502 · cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG · submitted Jul 3, 2026 · updated Oct 1, 2026
abstract · pdf · html · Accepted to NeurIPS 2026, 10 main paper pages, 27 appendix pages

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