Reading and Steering Representations of Materials-Science Mechanisms in an Open-Weight Language Model

Large language models can answer scientific questions, yet a correct output does not reveal whether the model represents or uses the governing physics.

Large language models can answer scientific questions, yet a correct output does not reveal whether the model represents or uses the governing physics. Here we show that materials science mechanism information in the open-weight google/gemma-4-E4B-it model has three…