Operational Proto-Introspection in Looped Language Models: Process-Quality Taps, Executable Branching, and the Readout-Control Boundary

תקציר מקורי באנגליתarXiv:2607.18553v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Can a language model read the quality of ongoing computation, and can an external intervention turn that readout into better outcomes? We test both questions in a frozen 2.6B looped transformer, Ouro-RLTT. On GSM8K, a strict pre-answer probe excludes the answer region and gold value yet predicts eventual success: hidden states plus length and log-probability shortcuts reach AUROC 0.797, versus 0.731 for the shortcuts alone (incremental +0.066; task-clustered 95% CI [+0.021, +0.112]; 170 tasks, 680 candidates). Low-capacity taps also read role-specialized properties: task-disjoint branch survival reaches 0.9697 oracle retention, content ranking reaches 0.6310 macro top-1, and generated-branch correctness reaches AUROC 0.7755. A non-looped cont