cs.CLApr 7, 2026

What are They Thinking? Delineation, Probing, and Tracking of Concepts in LLMs

Authors: Mohamed AbdelwahabMichelle Yu CollinsSihan ChenYi Cheng ZhaoZafarullah MahmoodJiading ZhuSoliman AliJonathan Rose

Organizations: The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering University of Toronto

Abstract

As the influence of LLMs expands, it is imperative to gain insight into their decisions. One way to do that is to develop probes that detect the presence or absence of a broad set of high-level abstract concepts within the embeddings computed in an LLM - which is what we might say a model is ``thinking" about. Such probes should be low-cost and easily applicable to any LLM, so that monitoring for many concepts is possible during normal operation. In this paper, we take the first steps towards developing the capability of creating many such probes by defining and executing examples of the key tasks needed: first, the careful delineation of a high-level abstract concept through the creation of a dataset with the concept both present and then absent. Then, the training and testing of a set of linear probes to detect the concept on any layer of an LLM, including an exploration of the complexity of the probe needed. Finally, we show that such probes can track concepts across larger contexts. This is done with four separate concepts and three different LLMs. When this process is scaled to many more concepts, it will create the ability to monitor new models.

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