Structured but Silent: Probing Capability Requirements in LLM Hidden States

Excerpt

arXiv:2610.08018v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reliable tool use requires more than triggering a mechanism or matching a query to an API description. Before selecting a specific tool, an agent must first infer the capability requirements implied by the user query. In this paper, we investigate whether these query-side capability requirements are linearly decodable from LLM hidden representations prior to generation, and how this hidden-state accessibility compares with explicit verbal classific