arXiv Machine Learning

The information geometry of large language models is shared, learned, and controllable

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.

arXiv AI
Jun 3

Decomposing how prompting steers behavior

arXiv:2606. 03093v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Prompting steers large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs) without weight updates, but it remains unclear how instruction changes reshape internal representations to produce behavior.

By Fan L. Cheng, Nikolaus Kriegeskorte
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 1

Learning Representations through Token Prediction: Geometry, Approximation, and Downstream Guarantees

The paper investigates why token prediction, a common pre‑training objective for language models, yields useful representations. It introduces a statistical framework linking token prediction accuracy to the geometry of token embeddings, showing that accurate predictions organize embeddings according to Hellinger distances between context distributions. The authors also propose a self‑consistency principle that refines contextual representations through repeated application of a shared block, and provide downstream guarantees for token generation, community recovery, and linear classification.

By Shulei Wang