Internal State Control is a General Property of LLMs

tl;dr:Lindsey 2025 found models can modulate their internal states: when instructed to “think about” a concept while writing an unrelated sentence, the representation of the concept is more present than when instructed to not think about it.Internal state controllability appears to be a general property of LLMs: the effect replicates in 14 open-weight models from 0.3B to 235B parameters (Qwen3, Gemma 3, Tulu 3) with no clear trend in the think vs. don't-think gap across scale.Since controllabili...