Recent work showed that language models represent character counts on curved 1D manifolds, with attention heads performing geometric transformations to enable computation. We test whether this generalizes across four ordinal tasks (bracket depth, indentation, table position, numeric magnitude) in Gemma-2-2B, Gemma-2-9B, and Qwen3-4B.
The paper investigates how large language models (LLMs) organize reasoning operations—such as problem formulation, goal decomposition, and deduction—within their hidden representation spaces. It shows that these operations are separable in held‑out representations, with peak separability in middle layers, and that token‑wise alignment of operations becomes more distributed across spans as layers deepen. Attention‑masking experiments reveal that representations aligned to operations at chunk onsets depend on prior reasoning context, indicating a geometric correspondence between linguistic reasoning expressions and internal model structure.
By Seogyeong Jeong, Jaehui Hwang, Dongyoon Han, Geonmo Gu, Alice Oh, Taekyung Kim
arXiv:2608.20999v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Multimodal LLMs apply the language model interface to visual inputs, where ordinal regression tasks such as age estimation, image quality assessment, a...
By Haiming Li, Yingsheng Liu, Jingmin Zhu, Siyuan Yan, Xieji Li, Jiajun Sun, Zhen Yu, Zongyuan Ge
arXiv:2509. 10534v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The attention mechanism in a Transformer architecture matches key to query based on both content -- the what -- and position in a sequence -- the where.
By Anand Gopalakrishnan, Robert Csord\'as, J\"urgen Schmidhuber, Michael C. Mozer
arXiv:2601. 22402v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Rotary Positional Embeddings (RoPE) have become the standard for Large Language Models (LLMs) due to their ability to encode relative positions through geometric rotation.
By Kanishk Awadhiya
The paper proposes an encoder Transformer that explicitly separates semantic, absolute positional (AP), and relative positional (RP) information, restricting the masked‑language‑modeling objective to the semantic stream. This disentanglement reveals that the AP subspace collapses into a low‑frequency two‑dimensional manifold reflecting document structure, that attention heads specialize into structure‑ and semantic‑oriented groups with RP supporting only the latter, and that standard positional encodings fail to robustly encode macroscopic structure. The approach preserves positional encoding and improves performance on 49 out of 65 linguistic phenomena in the Flash‑Holmes probing benchmark.
By Pierre-Antoine Lequeu, Camille Barboule, Benjamin Piwowarski
The paper investigates how large language models encode and use relational information among tokens across transformer layers. By analyzing activations from prompts that require inferring relationships among three cyclic tokens (months, hours, weekdays, musical notes), the authors find a consistent layerwise progression: intermediate layers capture pairwise relationships, while later layers encode the full three‑token relationship to predict the next token. They also identify geometrically structured token relationships that do not influence prediction, and show that constraining models to use only causally relevant joint representations improves next‑token accuracy.
By Gurbir Arora, Toni J. B. Liu, Jiajun Bao, Rapha\"el Sarfati, Christopher J. Earls
arXiv:2510. 18315v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We investigate how embedding dimension affects the emergence of an internal "world model" in a transformer trained with reinforcement learning to perform bubble-sort-style adjacent swaps.
By Brady Bhalla, Honglu Fan, Nancy Chen, Tony Yue YU
arXiv:2602. 15029v3 Announce Type: replace 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.
By Dhruva Karkada, Daniel J. Korchinski, Andres Nava, Matthieu Wyart, Yasaman Bahri
The paper investigates how large language models (LLMs) share a common Fisher‑Rao geometry in their next‑token probability distributions, revealing that behaviour largely determines this geometry while activation geometry depends on coordinate choices. Across transformer, state‑space, and recurrent architectures, output geometries align more closely than activation geometries, and this shared structure facilitates semantic‑category transfer and improves agreement with human word choices as models scale and train. The study further demonstrates that geometry can guide minimum‑disturbance interventions, enabling reusable control that preserves behaviour better than Euclidean methods and enhances steering, editing, attribution, dictionary learning, and fine‑tuning.
By Dario Picozzi
arXiv:2606. 01269v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Transitive inference is the challenge of inferring that A < C from knowing only adjacent relations (A < B, B < C).
By Nishit Singh
arXiv:2607. 07047v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Understanding the geometric structure of pre-trained language model embeddings matters for interpretability and safety.
By Szczepan Konior, Alexandre Quemy, Przemys{\l}aw Klocek, Gr\'egoire Cattan, Bart{\l}omiej Sobieski