English

How does fine-tuning improve sensorimotor representations in large language models?

Computation and Language 2026-03-05 v1 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit a significant "embodiment gap", where their text-based representations fail to align with human sensorimotor experiences. This study systematically investigates whether and how task-specific fine-tuning can bridge this gap. Utilizing Representational Similarity Analysis (RSA) and dimension-specific correlation metrics, we demonstrate that the internal representations of LLMs can be steered toward more embodied, grounded patterns through fine-tuning. Furthermore, the results show that while sensorimotor improvements generalize robustly across languages and related sensory-motor dimensions, they are highly sensitive to the learning objective, failing to transfer across two disparate task formats.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.03313,
  title  = {How does fine-tuning improve sensorimotor representations in large language models?},
  author = {Minghua Wu and Javier Conde and Pedro Reviriego and Marc Brysbaert},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.03313},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T11:01:46.866Z