cs.CLAug 31, 2026

The First Token Is a Clue: Verbalizing Multi-Token Concepts from the J-lens

Authors: Xijie Gong, Tonghan Wang

Organizations: College of AI, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

Abstract

The Jacobian Lens (J-lens) is a recent tool for interpreting LLMs. It reads a hidden state as a ranked list of vocabulary tokens, leaving multi-token concepts without a representation of their own. The original J-lens work addresses this limitation with Template Lens, which precomputes vectors for a fixed phrase vocabulary, and Oracle Lens, which fine-tunes components to propose phrases and reconstruct phrase vectors. We ask whether multi-token concepts and their vectors can instead be recovered directly from J-lens and the frozen model. We find that the first token of a multi-token concept is about as readable as a single-token concept. Given the correct first token and source prompt, the frozen model recovers the second token in 88.3% of two-token cases. We show that a vector for the complete concept can be recovered from subsequent hidden states in a single forward pass. We therefore use J-lens to propose first tokens and let the frozen model complete candidate concepts. We then recover a vector for each candidate and score it alongside the complete vocabulary. Across 496 multi-hop clozes on Gemma-3-12B-IT, Llama-3.1-8B, and Qwen3-14B, our method achieves an average Rank@10\mathrm{Rank@}10 of 43.1%, compared with 27.6% for Template Lens. Without the J-lens clue, performance drops to 21.6%, showing that the first-token clue substantially improves readout. Causal concept swaps using the recovered vectors achieve an average succ@10\mathrm{succ}@10 of 61.4%, compared with 26.2% for Template Lens under the same intervention. These results show that first-token clues can guide multi-token concept recovery, while subsequent hidden states provide vectors for readout and intervention.

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