What's the Plan: Implicit Planning Mechanisms in Large Language Models

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.20164

What's the Plan: Implicit Planning Mechanisms in Large Language Models

This research explores implicit planning in large language models by examining how they anticipate future tokens during tasks like rhyming and question answering. The authors define forward planning as the creation of internal goal representations and backward planning as the adjustment of intermediate text to satisfy those goals. By using activation steering to manipulate hidden layers, the study demonstrates that models subconsciously prepare for specific outcomes, such as choosing the correct article "a" or "an" before a planned noun. This evidence suggests that models rely on heuristic planning circuits rather than just immediate token prediction to maintain long-distance coherence. The findings across various model families, including Gemma, Llama, and Qwen, indicate that these planning mechanisms are a pervasive feature of modern neural architectures. Such insights are critical for understanding model interpretability and ensuring the safety of autonomous reasoning in complex domains.

#ai #research #largelanguagemodels

Видео What's the Plan: Implicit Planning Mechanisms in Large Language Models канала Vinh Nguyen