Belief-reality separation lives in routing over a shared value slot in language models
A new paper reveals how large language models separate a character's belief from reality through a value slot and routing mechanism. The research shows two distinct mechanisms: a generic value slot for binding attributed values, and a router that selects which frame (belief or reality) to read from. The slot is filled either directly or via visibility-gated lookback, and the separation resides in routing subspaces rather than the slot itself. These findings hold across architectures and emerge between 3B and 7B parameters.
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[Submitted on 11 Jul 2026]
Title:Belief-reality separation lives in routing over a shared value slot in language models
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Abstract:Capable language models hold what a character believes apart from what is true: told "Anna believes the cup is blue; in reality it is red," they answer blue about Anna and red about the world. Where in the computation does that separation live? We show it rests on two separable mechanisms at two positions. A generic value slot binds the attributed value. A router at the query position selects which frame, the character's belief or reality, a query reads out. Two routes fill the slot: an asserted belief, whose value the text supplies, binds in directly; a derived belief, whose value must be inferred from what the character could see, arrives by a visibility-gated lookback. A subspace trained on either route steers the other, and only the derived route depends on described visibility. The slot itself carries no belief-reality tag: intervening on it moves a reality readout as strongly as a belief one. The separation lives instead in a dissociated pair of routing subspaces, which flip a query between frames without injecting the donor's value. These results hold across three architectures, on stimuli de-confounded against theory-of-mind-benchmark shortcuts; the behavior itself emerges between 3B and 7B across five model families. This paper develops the single belief-reality axis in depth; a companion paper shows the same slot-and-router format is shared across the other non-actual contexts a sentence can open (counterfactual, fictional, temporal).
Comments: 21 pages, 6 figures, 6 tables
Subjects:
Computation and Language (cs.CL); Machine Learning (cs.LG)
MSC classes: primary cs.CL, cross-list cs.LG
Cite as: arXiv:2607.11945 [cs.CL]
(or arXiv:2607.11945v1 [cs.CL] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.11945
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
Submission history
From: Oliver Steele [view email] [v1] Sat, 11 Jul 2026 10:39:03 UTC (440 KB)
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