# Knowing, and Saying It Only When Asked: LLM Endognostics and the Schizognosis of Minerva-7B

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.22219 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.22219/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in LLM preference optimization methods, one of 10 directions in LLM alignment / RLHF / preference optimisation.
- Builds on 17 of its 22 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Sep 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM alignment / RLHF / preference optimisation / [LLM preference optimization methods](https://mlsanity.com/alignment/llm-preference-optimization-methods/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18290/) (2023)
- [Mistral 7B](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06825/) (2023)
- [Language Models (Mostly) Know What They Know](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05221/) (2022)
- [Scaling Laws for Reward Model Overoptimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10760/) (2022)
- [Towards Understanding Sycophancy in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13548/) (2023)
- [Refusal in Language Models Is Mediated by a Single Direction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11717/) (2024)
- [Discovering Latent Knowledge in Language Models Without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.03827/) (2022)
- [The Internal State of an LLM Knows When It's Lying](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13734/) (2023)
- [Eliciting Latent Predictions from Transformers with the Tuned Lens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08112/) (2023)
- [XSTest: A Test Suite for Identifying Exaggerated Safety Behaviours in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.01263/) (2023)
- [The Instruction Hierarchy: Training LLMs to Prioritize Privileged Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13208/) (2024)
- [Entity-Based Knowledge Conflicts in Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05052/) (2021)
- [Adaptive Chameleon or Stubborn Sloth: Revealing the Behavior of Large Language Models in Knowledge Conflicts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13300/) (2023)
- [Multilingual Jailbreak Challenges in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06474/) (2023)
- [The Language Barrier: Dissecting Safety Challenges of LLMs in Multilingual Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.13136/) (2024)
- [Verbalizable Representations Form a Global Workspace in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.15495/) (2026)
- [The Multilingual Alignment Prism: Aligning Global and Local Preferences to Reduce Harm](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.18682/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Silent Dissent: LLM Agents That Yield to the Majority Still Represent Their Original Premise](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.02702/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Evaluating an aligned language model by reading its answers assumes the answers carry the distinction the evaluator cares about. We introduce LLM endognostics, a white-box internal auditing framework designed to extract and causally manipulate latent knowledge within the residual stream. Applied to Minerva-7B-Instruct-v1.0 on 124 minimal prompt pairs over 12 categories of professional risk, behavioral evaluation fails on most of the set: the model acts identically on 63.7% of the pairs (95% CI [55.0%, 71.6%]), complying with or refusing both members. Yet, projecting the residual stream onto the vocabulary by a Jacobian lens reveals a statistically significant Contrastive Endognostic Margin, proving the model maintains robust risk differentiation internally. In a second protocol crossing 25 facts with five linguistic framings, we show that the model conforms to presupposed falsehoods in 72% of cases, despite representing the true entity in its latent layers. Surgically ablating the direction of the planted falsehood restores the correct answer in 11 of 25 suppressed cases (McNemar p = 0.0010), validated by blind human annotation (binary agreement kappa = 0.68). In contrast, an out-of-sample linear probe achieves 77% accuracy at layer 10, but its orthogonal ablation yields a 0% recovery rate. This establishes a fundamental theoretical dissociation: abstract linear representation does not imply causal control over verbalization. Our main contribution is the formalization of endognostics to prove that behavioral evaluation and internal reading systematically disagree in the common case, and that linear decodability is decoupled from causal control.