Mountain Car position steering. The car's position ranges from −1.2 (left wall) to +0.5 (goal flag). Each point in the 3D scatter is a CNN encoder embedding (64-dim, projected via PCA). The spline follows the learned data manifold; the linear path is a straight line through embedding space; the probe path steps along the direction of a linear probe trained to recover position. Displayed frames are softmax-blended over the 20 nearest neighbors — sharp frames indicate on-manifold steering, blurry frames indicate off-manifold regions with no nearby real states.