Belief-Reality Separation in Language Models Emerges from Routing over a Shared Value Slot

Jul 15, 2026

A new preprint identifies two distinct mechanisms in language models that enable them to separate a character's beliefs from reality: a generic value slot that binds attributed values, and a router at the query position that determines which frame—belief or reality—is accessed. The value slot itself does not encode whether a value is a belief or reality; instead, the separation is achieved through dissociated routing subspaces that can switch queries between frames without transferring the donor's value. These findings are consistent across multiple model architectures and sizes, and are robust to confounds from theory-of-mind benchmarks.

Why it matters: This mechanistic insight advances our understanding of how language models represent and reason about mental states and non-actual contexts, which could inform future improvements in AI reasoning and interpretability.

Full story at: arXiv Computation and Language ↗