Really interesting result. The finding that task-specific role–filler structure is distributed across token representations made me wonder about a trajectory-level question: have you tested whether deliberate recursive self-conditioning changes the amount, density, or persistence of this structure?
In other words, if a model repeatedly takes its own intermediate conclusions as new input and recursively reprocesses them, does DISCOVER show a progressively richer or more distributed compositional representation than a token-matched non-recursive control?
Your causal results seem especially relevant here, because if recursive inference is actually expanding the active relational structure rather than merely generating more text, I’d expect that difference to become visible in the representations and in intervention behavior.