Legible Failures: Detecting and Repairing In-Context Binding Errors

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11216v1
• Date: Thu, 10 Sep 2026 08:20:15 GMT
• Title: Legible Failures: Detecting and Repairing In-Context Binding Errors
• Abstract summary: Wrong answer does not show whether the model lacked the needed information or held it and failed to use it.<n>We measure how often this occurs across 16 public checkpoints, each evaluated with three seeds.<n>We find that in-context binding is a setting in which probes are actionable.
• Score: 0.0
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: A wrong answer does not show whether the model lacked the needed information or held it and failed to use it. On an entity-obligation binding task, a language model can emit an incorrect prompt-supplied binding while a linear probe can recover the correct one from its frozen hidden state. We measure how often this occurs across 16 public checkpoints, each evaluated with three seeds. We fit a probe on a training fold, select its layer on a validation fold, and report results on a disjoint test fold. On the trials each model gets wrong, probe accuracy exceeds the strict present-obligation baseline, 1/K = 0.125, by +0.196 (95% CI [+0.101, +0.296], bootstrapped over models). A query-entity counterfactual rules out token presence and recency. A score built from the sign of probe-output disagreement improves failure detection over the model's own confidence by +0.079 AUROC (95% CI [+0.036, +0.126]). Raw probe confidence gives no measurable improvement over model confidence. Steering the residual stream toward the probe-decoded binding, with no gold label, raises accuracy on all eight models tested by a mean of +0.168 (95% CI [+0.066, +0.280]). Where recent studies report that probe-detected errors are resistant to interventions, we find that in-context binding is a setting in which probes are actionable.

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