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Sprint projectAug 17, 2026Chapin, SC, USA

Clodak Coral: Occluded Self-Recognition in LLMs

Jessica Lee Nelson · Team Jessica & Friends

Submitted to Digital Minds Research Sprint. Sprint projects are early-stage work by participants, not Apart Research publications.

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Report: Clodak Coral: Occluded Self-Recognition in LLMs

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We compared models' self-recognition results in a "police line-up"-inspired methodology to their stylometric findability results. Although one Claude model can consistently recognize itself in such line-ups, this turns out to be due findability—and that all the models tend to identify with that model. When that model was removed from the line-ups, however, another model's latent abilty to find itself was revealed to a statistically significant degree.

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How much would this matter for the field if it worked? How innovative is it? For scores of 4-5: is this actually new to the field, or replicating recent work?

Scoring guide
  1. 1Negligible. No clear problem addressed, or no meaningful novelty.
  2. 2Limited. Addresses a real problem but with a generic or well-trodden approach. Incremental at best.
  3. 3Moderate. Clear problem with a reasonable approach; some novelty in framing or method beyond routine application of existing tools.
  4. 4Significant. Important problem with an original approach, or identifies a neglected problem area. A valuable contribution others could build on.
  5. 5Exceptional. Tackles a critical problem with a genuinely novel approach, or opens a new research direction. Clear theory of change. You'd be excited to share this with researchers in the area.

How sound are methodology, implementation, and findings?

Scoring guide
  1. 1Seriously flawed. Methodology broken, results uninterpretable, or implementation doesn't work.
  2. 2Weak. Approach has significant gaps: missing validation, flawed experimental design, or incomplete implementation.
  3. 3Competent. Technically solid given the short duration. Methodology makes sense, results are interpretable, limitations acknowledged, work builds toward clear conclusions.
  4. 4Strong. Thorough methodology with convincing validation. Results clearly support conclusions. Immediately useful for future work.
  5. 5Exceptional. Ambitious scope executed rigorously. Surprising findings, novel methods, or unusually robust validation.

How clearly are work, findings, and impact potential communicated?

Scoring guide
  1. 1Incomprehensible. Cannot determine what the project is actually claiming or doing.
  2. 2Hard to follow. Key information buried, missing, or diluted by excessive length. Significant effort to extract main points.
  3. 3Clear enough. Can understand the problem, approach, and results without undue effort. Core content clearly present: problem, method, findings, limitations.
  4. 4Well presented. Easy to follow, well-structured, appropriate level of detail. Target audience would get it quickly.
  5. 5Exceptionally clear. A pleasure to read. Complex ideas made accessible. Could serve as a model for how to present this type of work.

  1. This is a neat, simple idea. The police lineup setup is easy to understand and provides a good source of intuition. I'm surprised that the models didn't perform better at this task, especially given previous results on self-recognition. Looking at a larger set of models and more diverse inputs might have been informative. The write-up might have benefited from a more restrained style, as the coup framing distracts from an otherwise clear and strong project.

Cite this project

@misc{nelson2026clodak,
  title = {{Clodak Coral: Occluded Self-Recognition in LLMs}},
  author = {Jessica Lee Nelson},
  year = {2026},
  month = aug,
  note = {Submitted to Digital Minds Research Sprint, an Apart Research Sprint},
  howpublished = {\url{https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/clodak-coral-occluded-selfrecognition-in-llms-liu1}},
  url = {https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/clodak-coral-occluded-selfrecognition-in-llms-liu1}
}

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