arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 24

Computation Over Geometry: Meaning Identity Is Computed, Not Shipped in the Embeddings

The paper argues that meaning identity—whether two sentences convey the same idea after wording changes—is not encoded in the geometry of independently produced sentence embeddings. Experiments on frozen off‑the‑shelf encoders and language models show that identity can only be reliably computed when both sentences are processed together in a single forward pass, yielding high accuracy (0.90–0.96) on PAWS‑X, whereas independent embeddings or simple fusion methods perform near chance. Even advanced bi‑encoder fine‑tuning improves performance on PAWS but fails to generalize to other similarity tasks, underscoring that identity is a cheap computed operator rather than a property of individual sentence vectors.

By Jiaqi Deng
arXiv AI
Oct 2

Rules Amortize, Pairings Don't: Linguistic Structure Determines What Latent Task Representations Can Replace In-Context Learning

The paper investigates which linguistic operations can be replaced by latent task representations instead of in‑context prompts. A 2.6 M‑parameter network learns to encode the geometry of a few‑shot support set and applies an additive update to a frozen GPT‑2 model, achieving zero‑shot performance comparable to or better than 10‑shot in‑context learning for forward inflection and lemmatization. However, for arbitrary pairings such as antonymy, the latent approach only reaches about half the performance of in‑context learning, indicating that productive rules amortize well while memorized pairings do not.

By Gunmay Jhingran