Legible Failures: Detecting and Repairing In-Context Binding Errors — Paper

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.

Authors 3

Manas Venkata Sai Ravulapalli, Samrath Singh Chadha, Abhinav M. Hari

Specification

Official page: arxiv.org/abs/2609.11216
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 1 h agohigh
Arxiv announce type: new
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 1 h agohigh
arXiv id: 2609.11216
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 1 h agohigh
Categories: cs.LG
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 1 h agohigh
PDF: arxiv.org/pdf/2609.11216
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 1 h agohigh
Primary category: cs.LG
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 1 h agohigh
Published: 11 Sept 2026
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 1 h agohigh

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9

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T19

Freshest observation

1 h ago

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None

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Authors: Manas Venkata Sai Ravulapalli, Samrath Singh Chadha, Abhinav M. Hari

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Claim history · Official page

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Claim history for Official page
Value	Valid from → to	Status	Source	Confidence	Extractor
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11216	11 Sept 2026 21:02 UTC → current	current	arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1	high	deterministic

Claims are temporal and append-only: a new observation closes the previous claim (valid_to) instead of overwriting it. Conflicting claims from different sources are kept side by side and flagged — never averaged. Methodology →

11 Sept 2026
New paperPaperLegible Failures: Detecting and Repairing In-Context Binding Errors
New paper: Legible Failures: Detecting and Repairing In-Context Binding Errors
arxiv
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Source documents
Source	Document	Type	Tier	Last observed	Snapshots
arXiv (Atom API + RSS)	rss.arxiv.org/rss/cs.LG	feed	T1· Official	1 h ago	1

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