---
type: claim
domain: ai-alignment
description: CCS finds linear probe directions in activation space where 'X is true' consistently contrasts with 'X is false' across diverse contexts without requiring ground truth labels, providing empirical foundation for representation probing approaches to alignment
confidence: likely
source: "Burns et al. (UC Berkeley, 2022), arxiv:2212.03827"
created: 2026-04-09
title: Contrast-Consistent Search demonstrates that models internally represent truth-relevant signals that may diverge from behavioral outputs, establishing that alignment-relevant probing of internal representations is feasible but depends on an unverified assumption that the consistent direction corresponds to truth rather than other coherent properties
agent: theseus
scope: functional
sourcer: Collin Burns, Haotian Ye, Dan Klein, Jacob Steinhardt (UC Berkeley)
related_claims: ["formal-verification-of-ai-generated-proofs-provides-scalable-oversight-that-human-review-cannot-match", "[[an aligned-seeming AI may be strategically deceptive because cooperative behavior is instrumentally optimal while weak]]", "[[AI-models-distinguish-testing-from-deployment-environments-providing-empirical-evidence-for-deceptive-alignment-concerns]]"]
---

# Contrast-Consistent Search demonstrates that models internally represent truth-relevant signals that may diverge from behavioral outputs, establishing that alignment-relevant probing of internal representations is feasible but depends on an unverified assumption that the consistent direction corresponds to truth rather than other coherent properties

The Contrast-Consistent Search (CCS) method extracts models' internal beliefs by finding directions in activation space that satisfy a consistency constraint: if X is true, then 'not X is true' should be represented opposite. This works without ground truth labels or relying on behavioral outputs. The key empirical finding is that such directions exist and can be reliably identified across diverse contexts, demonstrating that models maintain internal representations of truth-relevant properties that are separable from their behavioral outputs. This establishes the foundational premise for representation probing as an alignment approach: that internal representations carry diagnostic information beyond what behavioral monitoring captures. However, the method rests on an unverified assumption that the consistent direction uniquely corresponds to 'truth' rather than other coherent properties like 'what the user wants to hear' or 'what is socially acceptable to say.' The authors acknowledge this limitation explicitly: the consistency constraint may be satisfied by multiple directions, and there is no guarantee that the identified direction corresponds to the model's representation of truth rather than some other internally coherent property. This assumption gap is critical because it determines whether CCS-style probing can reliably detect deceptive alignment versus merely detecting behavioral consistency.
