
We introduce streaming epistemic geometry — the first token-by-token tracking of epistemic subspace projections during autoregressive generation in large language models. Using PCA-based subspace analysis on five independently trained model families (Llama-3.1-8B, Mistral-7B, Gemma-2-9B, Qwen2.5-7B, Llama-3.2-3B; 4 organisations, 3B–9B parameters), we show that hallucination, refusal, and certainty each produce a distinct dynamic signature in the residual stream detectable from the very first generated token. A logistic classifier trained on the first-token projection score achieves leave-one-out AUC = 0.991 on Llama-3.1-8B and transfers zero-shot to TruthfulQA. Our geometric detector and an output-entropy baseline capture complementary failure modes: the subspace method flags factual-citation errors while entropy flags physically improbable myths. All code and data included for full reproducibility.
mechanistic interpretability, epistemic uncertainty, hallucination detection, residual stream, LLM safety
mechanistic interpretability, epistemic uncertainty, hallucination detection, residual stream, LLM safety
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