What's the plan? Metrics for implicit planning in LLMs and their application to rhyme generation and question answering
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arXiv
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| Auteurs principaux: | , , , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
| Publié: |
2026
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| _version_ | 1866909032443281408 |
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| author | Maar, Jim Paperno, Denis McDougall, Callum Stuart Nanda, Neel |
| author_facet | Maar, Jim Paperno, Denis McDougall, Callum Stuart Nanda, Neel |
| contents | Prior work suggests that language models, while trained on next token prediction, show implicit planning behavior: they may select the next token in preparation to a predicted future token, such as a likely rhyming word, as supported by a prior qualitative study of Claude 3.5 Haiku using a cross-layer transcoder. We propose much simpler techniques for assessing implicit planning in language models. With case studies on rhyme poetry generation and question answering, we demonstrate that our methodology easily scales to many models. Across models, we find that the generated rhyme (e.g. "-ight") or answer to a question ("whale") can be manipulated by steering at the end of the preceding line with a vector, affecting the generation of intermediate tokens leading up to the rhyme or answer word. We show that implicit planning is a universal mechanism, present in smaller models than previously thought, starting from 1B parameters. Our methodology offers a widely applicable direct way to study implicit planning abilities of LLMs. More broadly, understanding planning abilities of language models can inform decisions in AI safety and control. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_20164 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | What's the plan? Metrics for implicit planning in LLMs and their application to rhyme generation and question answering Maar, Jim Paperno, Denis McDougall, Callum Stuart Nanda, Neel Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence Computation and Language Prior work suggests that language models, while trained on next token prediction, show implicit planning behavior: they may select the next token in preparation to a predicted future token, such as a likely rhyming word, as supported by a prior qualitative study of Claude 3.5 Haiku using a cross-layer transcoder. We propose much simpler techniques for assessing implicit planning in language models. With case studies on rhyme poetry generation and question answering, we demonstrate that our methodology easily scales to many models. Across models, we find that the generated rhyme (e.g. "-ight") or answer to a question ("whale") can be manipulated by steering at the end of the preceding line with a vector, affecting the generation of intermediate tokens leading up to the rhyme or answer word. We show that implicit planning is a universal mechanism, present in smaller models than previously thought, starting from 1B parameters. Our methodology offers a widely applicable direct way to study implicit planning abilities of LLMs. More broadly, understanding planning abilities of language models can inform decisions in AI safety and control. |
| title | What's the plan? Metrics for implicit planning in LLMs and their application to rhyme generation and question answering |
| topic | Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence Computation and Language |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.20164 |