arxivcs.LGcs.CL2026-06-28
Do Models Read What They Write? Causal Registers in Scratchpad Reasoning
Benjamin Shih, John Winnicki, Eric Darve
A central hope behind process supervision is that models can expose intermediate variables that matter for their later behavior. For this to help with alignment, a scratchpad must be tied to the computation: when the model writes a state, later steps should compute from that stat…