arXiv Machine Learning By Adam Hollowell

Replicating the Geometry of Emotion Representations in a Base Open-Weights Model

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Sofroniew et al. (2026) showed that emotion concepts in Claude Sonnet 4.5 are encoded as vectors whose geometry mirrors human affect psychology. This study replicates that finding using the base pretrained model google/gemma-2-27b, generating 205,200 Claude Sonnet 4.5 stories, extracting 171 emotion vectors, and recovering a similar affective circumplex with principal components explaining comparable variance. The analysis further identifies a sharp geometric seam at layers 22‑26, demonstrates that much of the geometry already exists in static token embeddings, and shows that the geometry predicts token‑level co‑activation with high correlation.

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