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Medical LLM failures are decodable but uncorrectable by linear steering

Researchers have identified a phenomenon in medical large language models called Overthinking (OT), where models answer correctly in standard QA but fail in extended chain-of-thought reasoning. This failure state is linearly decodable with high accuracy, yet attempts to correct it using fixed linear steering methods proved ineffective across different architectures and domains. The study suggests that the failure signals are entangled with critical task computations, hindering direct correction but enabling improved post-generation reliability estimation. AI

IMPACT Identifies a specific failure mode in LLMs that hinders correction but aids reliability estimation.

RANK_REASON Academic paper detailing a specific failure mode in LLMs and exploring correction methods. [lever_c_demoted from research: ic=1 ai=1.0]

Read on arXiv cs.LG →

AI-generated summary · Google Gemini · from 1 sources. How we write summaries →

Medical LLM failures are decodable but uncorrectable by linear steering

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Academic paper detailing a specific failure mode in LLMs and exploring correction methods. [lever_c_demoted from research: ic=1 ai=1.0]
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COVERAGE [1]

  1. arXiv cs.LG TIER_1 English(EN) · Ming Liu ·

    Decodable but Not Corrected by Fixed Residual-Stream Linear Steering: Evidence from Medical LLM Failure Regimes

    arXiv:2605.05715v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Can linearly decodable failure signals in LLM hidden states be leveraged to correct those failures? We investigate this classification-correction gap via Overthinking (OT)--a stable behavioral regime (Jaccard >= 0.81, 94% inter-an…