Decodable but Not Corrected by Fixed Residual-Stream Linear Steering: Evidence from Medical LLM Failure Regimes

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Abstract

Can linearly decodable failure signals in LLM hidden states be leveraged to correct those failures? We investigate this classification-correction gap via Overthinking (OT)--a stable behavioral regime (Jaccard >= 0.81, 94% inter-annotator agreement) in medical QA where models answer correctly under resampling yet fail in extended chain-of-thought. OT is linearly decodable at 71.6% balanced accuracy (p < 10^{-16}). Yet five families of fixed linear steering (29 configurations, n=1,273) all yield Delta ~= 0, with identical null results cross-architecture (Qwen2.5-7B) and cross-domain (MMLU-STEM). Three convergent lines of evidence suggest representational entanglement: the OT direction has 85-88% overlap with task-critical computation (specificity ratio <= 0.152); non-targeted shared-direction steering damages accuracy (-12.1pp); and LEACE concept erasure damages accuracy (-3.6pp, p=0.01), while 10 random erasures produce Delta=+0.3pp. The per-instance probe-steering correlation is r=-0.002 (p=0.97). Positively, the same probe enables selective abstention (held-out AUROC=0.610, exceeding all five uncertainty baselines, p=0.009): decodable failure structure supports post-generation reliability estimation even when the fixed linear steering family cannot exploit it for correction.