Detection != Reliable Control: Decodable Empathy Directions Yield at Most Partial Shifts in Automated Empathy Scores
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Computer Science > Computation and Language
Title:Detection != Reliable Control: Decodable Empathy Directions Yield at Most Partial Shifts in Automated Empathy Scores
Abstract:A decodable "empathy" direction is routinely read as a causal lever, conflating decodability, automated-metric control, and human-perceived change. We test this for two EPITOME-derived facets -- Recognition (cognitive) and Resonance (affective) -- in three instruction-tuned LLMs, scoring every intervention with two LLM judges and a discriminative EPITOME classifier, each gated by an emotional-vs-neutral positive control. The control passes for the affective facet across all automated instruments, but cognitive range is inconsistent across them. Both facets remain decodable after residualizing against a sentence-embedding-derived surface score, and steering can substantially rewrite the text. Yet adding the Resonance direction raises the affective score only partially -- in Qwen by +0.29 (approximately 26% of the natural gap). A direct between-direction contrast confirms the shift is facet-specific in Qwen and Llama (not Gemma); we do not, however, establish a matching human-perceived change. Additive cognitive steering produces no measurable change, but a within-domain control shows the cognitive instrument is too coarse to resolve the differences such steering would produce -- unmeasurable, not a clean null. By contrast, Gemma Recognition ablation lowers the classifier's cognitive score even after adjusting for response length. Detection does not imply reliable control under global interventions, and cognitive-empathy claims warrant an explicit measurement-sensitivity check.
| Comments: | Under review at BlackboxNLP 2026 (EMNLP). 8 pages body, 10 figures/tables, plus appendix |
| Subjects: | Computation and Language (cs.CL); Human-Computer Interaction (cs.HC); Machine Learning (cs.LG) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2608.24901 [cs.CL] |
| (or arXiv:2608.24901v1 [cs.CL] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.24901
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