NLA Can Read Concepts Hidden from the Model's View
Pvforpres · reddit · 2026-07-10
The author claims to have used Anthropic's NLA to capture thought traces in Llama-70B's behavior that are "invisible to the model itself."
The experimental design roughly involves:
- Splitting concepts into "conscious / unconscious" parts and separating them according to Anthropic's J-space mechanism.
- Replicating Lindsey's "Introspection Awareness" experiment by asking the model if it recognizes these concepts.
The results show:
- The model has a 100% hit rate for "conscious" concepts.
- It explicitly denies seeing concepts injected outside of J-space.
- However, NLA can still accurately read out this non-J injection.
The author shared the full conclusions in a LessWrong post.
Related event: Reproducing J-space to Read Hidden Thoughts in Llama Models(2 posts)→
More from Research
- Meta FAIR's Self-Direction turns agent failures into reusable LoRA skills, +13.8pp on Terminal-Bench — karen_ullrich · 2026-10-27
- DONIC hits 86.79% on bimanual dexterous tracking, crushing prior SOTA's 9.43% — liuziwei7 · 2026-10-27
- Why don't more LLMs ship 10M-token context? A researcher asks about attention tradeoffs — agarwl_ · 2026-10-27
- PSNR below 15 dB in papers likely means the metric was misused, researcher warns — kwangmoo_yi · 2026-10-27
- Ortet's first health eval: 34 open-weight models, 50 tasks, generic rankings fall short — thegautamkamath · 2026-10-27
- Scaling-fit discrepancy: output-head FLOPs are ~65% of compute at the smallest rung, ~3% at 535B — dlwh · 2026-10-27