Towards Computational Provenance: Carrying Causal-State Evidence in Generated Text

Causal probing methods aim to test and control how internal representations influence the behavior of generative models. In causal probing, an intervention modifies hidden states so that a property takes on a different value. Most existing approaches define such interventions by training an auxiliary probe classifier, which ties the method to a specific task or model and risks misalignment with the model's predictive geometry. We propose Hidden-state Driven Margin Intervention (HDMI), a probe-free, gradient-based technique that directly steers hidden states using the model's native output. HDMI applies a margin objective that increases the probability of a target continuation while decreasing that of the source, without relying on probe classifiers. We further introduce a lookahead variant (LA-HDMI) for text editing that backpropagates through the softmax embeddings, modifying the current hidden state so that the likelihood of user-specified tokens increases in next token generations while preserving fluency. To evaluate interventions, we measure completeness (whether the targeted property changes as intended) and selectivity (whether unrelated properties are preserved), and report their harmonic mean as an overall measure of reliability. HDMI consistently achieves higher reliability than prior methods on the LGD agreement corpus and the CausalGym benchmark, across Meta-Llama-3-8B-Instruct, and Pythia-70M.

Retrieval-augmented generation promises to ground language model outputs in external evidence, yet the field has no reliable way to verify whether retrieved context actually governs generation -- a prerequisite for any high-stakes deployment. The standard assumption, that context-consistent output implies context-governed output, breaks when the retrieved document overlaps with the model's pretraining data: the model can produce faithful-looking text entirely from parametric memory, and both pathways yield indistinguishable output. We name this failure the attribution blind spot and introduce Computational Reality Monitoring (CRM) to address it. CRM operationalizes a principle adapted from cognitive science's reality monitoring framework: comparing internal representations with and without context reveals membership-conditioned representational divergence that output-level monitors systematically miss. CRM does not certify which source an individual generation used; it detects whether pretraining exposure leaves a measurable internal trajectory signature, establishing a necessary substrate for source attribution. Across nine model variants spanning three families, this divergence concentrates in architecture-specific layer patterns, receives converging support from block-level noise intervention, and generalizes across tasks and datasets while collapsing on domain-confounded benchmarks. The attribution blind spot is measurable and partially addressable: internal representations carry a diagnostic signal invisible at the output level, establishing a foundation for systems whose internal awareness of evidence provenance governs their external behavior.

Although professional workflows leverage large language models widely, the interpretation for auditing unconstrained free-text generation is usually intractable if such generation demands legal, operational or financial workflow. We hereby demonstrate a text based system called SerenAI - inspired by world-models, it is a state transition system that outputs verifiable predictions rather than merely text: Provided with a description of the environment, state, and actions, the generated output contains 4 items: causal deltas that causally effect the given state, a next state that can logically follow from the given state and action, a validity reward, and a termination signal. For the released proto-model, we employ 2 steps of adaptation training, namely parameter efficient fine-tuning followed by verifier based RL over 50,000 exampled cause and effects in 12 environments spanning 10 reasoning domains. Compared to an initial internal evaluation of an 8B open-weight baseline, SerenAI increased JSON validity from 85.0% to 93.2%, schema validity from 55.0% to 84.0%, exact structured-output match from 0.0% to 41.5%, causal-delta exact match from 0.0% to 41.5%, resulting-state exact match from 0.0% to 42.0%, reward exact match from 1.0% to 80.5%, and termination exact match from 38.0% to 81.5%. These support the narrower claim that verifier-compatible adaptation can improve structured transition prediction. They do not yet establish legal-grade reliability. Accordingly, the paper also specifies a validation protocol for evidence-grounded legal workflows, calibration, human oversight, and sovereign on-premise deployment.