The Knowing-Saying Gap: When Probes See Errors that Confidence Misses

arXiv:2608.07528v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Linear probes detect corrupted context in language models with near-perfect accuracy, yet this does not translate into reliable failure prediction. The result is a dissociation with direct implications for deployment monitoring. Across multi-hop arithmetic chains, probes that detect corruption turn out to be uninformative about final answer correctness; models forced into structured confidence formats collapse to two values with indistinguishable e...