📖 NLP Understanding

🔬 ICLR2026 · 1 paper notes

📌 Same area in other venues: 🧪 ICML2026 (2) · 💬 ACL2026 (33) · 🤖 AAAI2026 (1) · 🧠 NeurIPS2025 (3) · 📹 ICCV2025 (1)

What's the Plan? Metrics for Implicit Planning in LLMs and Their Application to Rhyme Generation and Question Answering

This paper proposes a mean activation difference steering method along with accompanying quantitative metrics, and systematically demonstrates across 23 open-source models (1B–32B) on rhyme generation and question answering: representations of target tokens (rhymes/answers) form at early sequence positions (forward planning) and causally influence intermediate token generation (backward planning). Implicit planning emerges as early as 1B-scale models, indicating it is a universal mechanism rather than a capability exclusive to large models.