English

Transformer Injectivity & Geometric Robustness - Analytic Margins and Bi-Lipschitz Uniformity of Sequence-Level Hidden States

Machine Learning 2025-11-20 v1 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Under real-analytic assumptions on decoder-only Transformers, recent work shows that the map from discrete prompts to last-token hidden states is generically injective on finite prompt sets. We refine this picture: for each layer \ell we define a collision discriminant ΔΘ\Delta^\ell \subset \Theta and injective stratum U=ΘΔU^\ell = \Theta \setminus \Delta^\ell, and prove a dichotomy -- either the model is nowhere injective on the set, or UU^\ell is open and dense and every FθF^\ell_\theta is injective. Under mild non-singularity assumptions on the optimizer and an absolutely continuous initialization, generic injectivity persists along smooth training trajectories over any fixed horizon. We also treat symmetry groups GG, showing that discriminants and injective strata descend to the quotient Θ/G\Theta/G, so injectivity is naturally a property of functional equivalence classes. We complement these results with an empirical study of layerwise geometric diagnostics. We define a separation margin and a co-Lipschitz (lower Lipschitz) constant between prompt space and last-token representation space, estimated via nearest-neighbor statistics on large prompt sets. Applying these diagnostics to pretrained LLaMA-3 and Qwen models, we study behavior across layers, sequence lengths, model scales, and 8- and 4-bit activation quantization. On our sampled prompts we see no collisions in full precision or at 8 bits, while 4-bit quantization induces a small number of collisions and markedly shrinks co-Lipschitz estimates. For a small GPT-2 trained from scratch, normalized metrics remain stable over training. Overall, the results suggest that Transformer representations are generically and persistently injective in the continuous-parameter idealization, while their practical invertibility can be probed using simple geometric diagnostics.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2511.14808,
  title  = {Transformer Injectivity & Geometric Robustness - Analytic Margins and Bi-Lipschitz Uniformity of Sequence-Level Hidden States},
  author = {Mikael von Strauss},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.14808},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

22 pages, 5 figures