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Autores principales: Kamel, Adam, Rastogi, Tanish, Ma, Michael, Ranganathan, Kailash, Zhu, Kevin
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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Acceso en línea:https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.23722
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author Kamel, Adam
Rastogi, Tanish
Ma, Michael
Ranganathan, Kailash
Zhu, Kevin
author_facet Kamel, Adam
Rastogi, Tanish
Ma, Michael
Ranganathan, Kailash
Zhu, Kevin
contents Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong reasoning abilities across diverse fields, from solving programming challenges to competing in strategy-intensive games such as chess. Prior work has shown that LLMs can develop emergent world models in games of perfect information, where internal representations correspond to latent states of the environment. In this paper, we extend this line of investigation to domains of incomplete information, focusing on poker as a canonical partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP). We pretrain a GPT-style model on Poker Hand History (PHH) data and probe its internal activations. Our results demonstrate that the model learns both deterministic structure, such as hand ranks, and stochastic features, such as equity, without explicit instruction. Furthermore, by using primarily nonlinear probes, we demonstrated that these representations are decodeable and correlate with theoretical belief states, suggesting that LLMs are learning their own representation of the stochastic environment of Texas Hold'em Poker.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_23722
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Emergent World Beliefs: Exploring Transformers in Stochastic Games
Kamel, Adam
Rastogi, Tanish
Ma, Michael
Ranganathan, Kailash
Zhu, Kevin
Computation and Language
Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong reasoning abilities across diverse fields, from solving programming challenges to competing in strategy-intensive games such as chess. Prior work has shown that LLMs can develop emergent world models in games of perfect information, where internal representations correspond to latent states of the environment. In this paper, we extend this line of investigation to domains of incomplete information, focusing on poker as a canonical partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP). We pretrain a GPT-style model on Poker Hand History (PHH) data and probe its internal activations. Our results demonstrate that the model learns both deterministic structure, such as hand ranks, and stochastic features, such as equity, without explicit instruction. Furthermore, by using primarily nonlinear probes, we demonstrated that these representations are decodeable and correlate with theoretical belief states, suggesting that LLMs are learning their own representation of the stochastic environment of Texas Hold'em Poker.
title Emergent World Beliefs: Exploring Transformers in Stochastic Games
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.23722