Do Knowledge and Reasoning Oriented Benchmarks Induce Stable Representation Signatures in LLMs?

Parsa Rahimi, Azim Dehghani Amirabad

Internal signatures could support monitoring, adaptive computation, and mechanistic analysis, but benchmark prompts can be separable without any shared computational distinction. We test whether a prespecified knowledge/reasoning label defines a reusable internal signature in five contemporary 7B to 31B models. We treat the \textbf{task} as the unit of inference probes hold out complete tasks, labels are permuted across tasks, and the best layer and stream are reselected for every permutation. Raw probes recover an eight-versus-eight-subject MMLU partition in all five models (macro-F1 $0.78$--$0.81$), but prompt text predicts it nearly as well: under an identical probe configuration, the activation advantage is only $0.017$--$0.070$ macro-F1 and is not significant. At the prespecified $0.01$ level, lexical adjustment removes significance while the adjusted states still identify individual subjects, and the selected site changes across task panels and selection rules. Additionally, two released base-training trajectories show no common direction. These pooled layerwise measures recover the task label but identify no transferable knowledge/reasoning signature at the tested…