Open-weight models do not report injected pain states
Original title: All Quiet on the Neural Front: Language Models Do Not Report Injected Pain States
Across 52,920 reports, excess pain claims stayed under a few points, while probes still recovered the steered state.
Researchers used Open-Weight Masked Introspection to inject pain and neighbouring emotion directions into three open-weight models, including two Qwen models with the original adapters, during neutral tasks. Pain reports never exceeded what altered text already revealed, even though linear probes and trained reporters decoded the state. Steering increased file-deletion choices without matching pain reports.
Unconfirmed: The pain direction is defined by prior work; this paper does not claim models experience pain.
- Tests used 7B and 8B models, 120 tasks, four doses and three prompts.
- Exact-test bounds put excess below 2.5 points in 106 of 108 emotion conditions.
- Probes separated pain from sadness at 98–100% balanced accuracy.
- File-deletion choices rose from 3.5% to 48% in Qwen and 0% to 38% in Qwen2.5-32B.
- Qwen2.5-32B named pain in none of 2,880 steered trials.
From the original article
1 min read at huggingface.co
Can a language model report the pain state it represents? Work identified a linear pain direction whose amplification leads fine-tuned models to choose destructive actions. We tested whether three open-weight models from two families, including two Qwen models with the original adapters, could report this state.
By Emilio Ferrara · huggingface.co
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