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:2601. 04098v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Transformer language models systematically prefer tokens at specific input positions regardless of semantic relevance---a phenomenon known as positional bias.
By Maryam Rahimi, Mahdi Nouri, Yadollah Yaghoobzadeh
arXiv:2510.01030v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: The human ability to translate diverse perceptual and linguistic inputs into structured behavior has been thought to rest on learning robust repres...
By Zach Studdiford, Timothy T. Rogers, Kushin Mukherjee, Siddharth Suresh
arXiv:2510.22752v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: In-context learning is governed by both temporal and semantic relationships, shaping how Large Language Models (LLMs) retrieve contextual inf...
By Anooshka Bajaj, Deven Mahesh Mistry, Sahaj Singh Maini, Yash Aggarwal, Zoran Tiganj
The paper investigates how semantic meaning is arranged locally within large language models. By using two controlled probes—one cross‑lingual and one refinement probe—on four decoder‑only LLMs, it finds that after removing dominant variance directions, sentence pairs rank by semantic relatedness, semantic factors cluster around an invariant core with structured variation, refinement tightens neighborhoods, and sentence‑level versus token‑local readouts reveal complementary geometric patterns. These results suggest that LLM semantics form local anisotropic neighborhoods that contract when meaning is refined.
By Andr\'es Daniel Godoy Ortiz
The paper compares latent representations in Selective State Space Models (SSMs) like Mamba and Transformers such as Pythia using Sparse Autoencoders. Across a 10‑million token corpus, 99.98% of Mamba features align closely with Pythia’s, supporting the Universality Hypothesis that core semantic representations are similar across architectures. A tiny 0.02% of features diverge, with Mamba’s recurrent bottleneck causing it to compress syntactic anomalies into polysemantic neurons, whereas Pythia’s attention can isolate distinct formatting edge‑cases.
By Rithin Nagaraj, Rupa Laalasa Oruganti, Prerna Subhashchandra Kunder, Ashwini M Joshi
arXiv:2607. 21291v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) achieve strong generation and reasoning performance, but the Transformer architecture incurs high inference cost.
By Yidu Wu, Xiang Wang, Kejie Zhao, Zhangchi Wang, Qinghai Guo, Xiaoying Tang
arXiv:2610.07168v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Representations of translated sentences are similar in the inner layers of multilingual language models -- an observation connected to the platonic rep...
By Darshil Doshi, Wenjie Zhou, Corinna Elena Wegner, Daniel J. Korchinski, Santiago Acevedo, Matthieu Wyart
arXiv:2610.07936v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Systematicity, the probabilistic mapping of form to meaning, permeates language at all levels, and sublexical cues have been shown to govern human pseu...
By Jing Chen, Giulia Loca, Simona Amenta, Marco Marelli
arXiv:2610.14476v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Comparing large language models can reveal shared representational structure and systematic differences between them. However, aggregate similarity m...
By Jialin Wu, Meenakshi Khosla
The study evaluates eleven autoregressive transformer models on English agreement attraction scenarios using a surprisal-based approach. Results show that while transformers match human reading times for prepositional phrase configurations, they perform poorly on object‑extracted relative clauses, with predictions diverging across models and failing to capture human interference patterns. The authors argue that current transformers cannot adequately model human morphosyntactic processing and call for more rigorous, comprehensive testing to avoid misleading conclusions from limited syntactic setups.
By Titus von der Malsburg, Sebastian Pad\'o
The paper introduces LLM-Microscope, a toolkit for measuring how Large Language Models encode contextual information at the token level. It shows that seemingly minor tokens—such as determiners, stopwords, and punctuation—carry surprisingly high contextual weight, and removing them degrades performance on benchmarks like MMLU and BABILong-4k. The study also finds a strong link between contextualization and linearity, indicating that the transformation between layers can be approximated by a single linear mapping when tokens are well contextualized.
By Anton Razzhigaev, Matvey Mikhalchuk, Temurbek Rahmatullaev, Elizaveta Goncharova, Polina Druzhinina, Ivan Oseledets, Andrey Kuznetsov