# Emission-controlled dual-target probing

Answer probes on chain-of-thought hidden states are often read as evidence that a model has settled its final answer, yet a hidden state also carries the candidate whose name is about to be written. Emission-controlled dual-target probing (ECDP) fits the same low-rank reader separately to the next candidate mention and to the final answer at identical positions, with target-specific nulls and thresholds fixed in advance. On DecisionDepth, Qwen3.5-4B decodes the next mention at .966 (null .234) but the final answer only at .221 (null .186), an emission gap of .696; Llama-3.1-8B gives .575. The order is not universal: in a Qwen3-8B MMLU setting the final answer is read more strongly.

Answer probes on chain-of-thought hidden states are often read as evidence that a model has settled its final answer, yet a hidden state also carries the candidate whose name is about to be written. Emission-controlled dual-target probing (ECDP) fits the same low-rank reader separately to the next candidate mention and to the final answer at identical positions, with target-specific nulls and thresholds fixed in advance. On DecisionDepth, Qwen3.5-4B decodes the next mention at .966 (null .234) but the final answer only at .221 (null .186), an emission gap of .696; Llama-3.1-8B gives .575. The order is not universal: in a Qwen3-8B MMLU setting the final answer is read more strongly.