Despite the widespread adoption of Vision Transformers (ViTs) and their success across numerous computer vision applications, the fundamental understanding of their dimensional and representational geometry remains relatively underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce Transformer Geometry Observatory (TGO), a systematic framework of experiments and analysis pipelines designed to investigate the representational geometry and dynamics of Vision Transformers.
arXiv:2606. 19249v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Despite the widespread adoption of Vision Transformers (ViTs) and their success across numerous computer vision applications, the fundamental understanding of their dimensional and representational geometry remains relatively underexplored.
arXiv:2607. 02386v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While Vision Transformers have achieved remarkable success across computer vision and language applications, the geometric evolution of their internal representations throughout training remains insufficiently understood.
arXiv:2505. 15441v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Natural images exhibit strong geometric regularities: local structures, such as edges, corners, and textures, appear in many orientations and mirror configurations.
arXiv:2606. 00124v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Positional embeddings (PEs) in Vision Transformers (ViTs) are known to impact performance and robustness, but their role in shaping internal spatial representations is not well understood.
arXiv:2601. 09173v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Representational similarity analysis and related methods compare the internal geometries of neural networks, but they measure only alignment between spaces, leaving a blind spot -- whether a representation's structure is reliably recoverable, not merely similar.
arXiv:2607. 12438v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep networks trained with label noise often learn clean structure before memorizing corrupted labels.
arXiv:2607. 14018v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We investigate how each component of the Transformer feedforward block architecture design determines how much rank survives across depth at initialization.
arXiv:2606. 10824v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Euler Characteristic Curve (ECC) records the Euler characteristic of a linearly embedded cell complex as a function of filtration height in a given direction, and the Euler Characteristic Transform (ECT) is the injective shape descriptor obtained by collecting ECCs over many directions.
arXiv:2607. 10677v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-attention is a ubiquitous primitive in modern sequence models, yet its operator-level geometry is only partially understood.
We investigate how each component of the Transformer feedforward block architecture design determines how much rank survives across depth at initialization. We reinterpret skip connections and normalization, long understood as controlling magnitude, as mechanisms for preserving gradient rank across depth, since the very matrix multiplications and nonlinear activations that make the network expressive also reduce the rank.
arXiv:2608. 02064v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Feed-forward networks (FFNs) account for a large fraction of Transformer parameters, yet their hidden width is usually constant across depth.
arXiv:2606. 04405v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern Transformer architectures frequently employ normalization mechanisms such as RMSNorm and Query-Key Normalization, making parts of the model approximately scale-invariant with respect to weight magnitudes.