Hierarchical concept geometry in embeddings emerges from the spectral properties of word co-occurrence statistics mirroring WordNet hypernym trees.
Symmetry in language statistics shapes the geometry of model representations
10 Pith papers cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.
abstract
The internal representations learned by language models consistently exhibit striking geometric structure: calendar months organize into a circle, historical years form a smooth one-dimensional manifold, and cities' latitudes and longitudes can be decoded using a linear probe. To explain this neural code, we first show that language statistics exhibit translation symmetry (for example, the frequency with which any two months co-occur in text depends only on the time interval between them). We prove that this symmetry governs these geometric structures in high-dimensional word embedding models, and we analytically derive the manifold geometry of word representations. These predictions empirically match large text embedding models and large language models. Moreover, the representational geometry persists at moderate embedding dimension even when the relevant statistics are perturbed (e.g., by removing all sentences in which two months co-occur). We prove that this robustness emerges naturally when the co-occurrence statistics are controlled by an underlying latent variable. Our results indicate that these representational manifolds originate in the statistical symmetries of natural language.
years
2026 10representative citing papers
Symmetries in next-token prediction targets induce corresponding geometric symmetries such as circulant matrices and equiangular tight frames in the optimal weights and embeddings of a layer-peeled LLM surrogate model.
ToxiREX is a new dataset of 128k Reddit comments in six languages with hierarchical annotations for implicit toxicity in conversational context based on an existing reasoning schema.
A framework quantifies hyperparameter transfer via scaling-law fit quality, extrapolation robustness, and loss penalty, with ablations showing that μP's advantage over standard parameterization stems from maximizing the embedding layer learning rate to avoid bottlenecks and instabilities in AdamW.
RSD fits shared three-anchor charts S_t to GPT-2 hidden states for target words, derives co-membership readouts M_t, and audits against WiC same-sense labels, passing 16 of 53 words as diagnostic coverage.
Diverse language models converge on similar periodic number features with a two-tier hierarchy of Fourier sparsity and geometric separability, acquired via language co-occurrences or multi-token arithmetic.
Introduces the Manifold Probe to discover representation manifolds in superposition and demonstrates causal steering on time concepts in Llama 2-7b.
Causal localization via attribution and patching identifies a temporal preference subgraph in mid-to-upper layers of Qwen3-4B-Instruct-2507, with time-horizon geometry in the residual stream and initial evidence for steering-vector control.
Perceptual geometry for color, pitch, emotion and taste emerges transiently in intermediate layers of transformer LLMs despite purely textual training.
A mechanics of the learning process is emerging in deep learning theory, characterized by dynamics, coarse statistics, and falsifiable predictions across idealized settings, limits, laws, hyperparameters, and universal behaviors.
citing papers explorer
No citing papers match the current filters.