Representation Without Control: Testing the Realization Effect in Language Models
The paper titled 'Representation Without Control: Testing the Realization Effect in Language Models' explores the cognitive mechanisms behind large language models. It investigates the realization effect, a phenomenon in behavioral economics, and how it relates to language model outputs. The study finds that while language models show sensitivity to prompts, their behavior does not align with human predictions regarding risk-taking based on realized gains and losses.
- ▪The study evaluates language model behavior at three levels: prompt sensitivity, internal representation readout, and causal control.
- ▪Results indicate that language models exhibit systematic condition sensitivity but do not replicate human realization-effect predictions.
- ▪The research concludes that successful latent readout does not guarantee that a model relies on a representation for decision-making.
arXiv cs.AI files mainly under ai research. We currently carry 1,128 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | arXiv cs.AI |
| Canonical URL | https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.25151 |
| Publication time | Tue, 26 May 2026 00:00:00 -0400 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-26T04:07:43.013Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-26T04:07:43.013Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | 8wKjS7la-Tdq |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence arXiv:2605.25151 (cs) [Submitted on 24 May 2026] Title:Representation Without Control: Testing the Realization Effect in Language Models Authors:Ciarán Walsh, Emilio Barkett View a PDF of the paper titled Representation Without Control: Testing the Realization Effect in Language Models, by Ciar\'an Walsh and 1 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:Large language models are increasingly used as behavioral simulators, but it remains unclear when their outputs reflect human-like cognitive mechanisms rather than prompt-sensitive surface patterns.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at arXiv cs.AI.
Discussion
0 commentsMore from arXiv cs.AI
