Learning to Read Out: Unembedding Dynamics in Language Model Pretraining
arXiv:2610.21025v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When does a language model acquire a capability? Developmental studies usually answer this by tracking when models start producing the correct token. But that prediction passes through the unembedding matrix, or readout, which is itself still being learned during pretraining. We show that a model's hidden states can encode task information before its own readout expresses it, so timelines read from outputs conflate what the model encodes with wh…