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Related papers: A Geometric Perspective on Next-Token Prediction i…

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We introduce a cumulant-expansion framework for quantifying how large language models (LLMs) internalize higher-order statistical structure during next-token prediction. By treating the softmax entropy of each layer's logit distribution as…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Karthik Viswanathan , Sang Eon Park

We present a geometric framework for analysing multi-head attention in large language models (LLMs). Without altering the mechanism, we view standard attention through a top-N selection lens and study its behaviour directly in value-state…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Timur Mudarisov , Mikhal Burtsev , Tatiana Petrova , Radu State

We seek to understand how the representations of individual tokens and the structure of the learned feature space evolve between layers in deep neural networks under different learning objectives. We focus on the Transformers for our…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-09-05 Elena Voita , Rico Sennrich , Ivan Titov

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved impressive performance across diverse tasks but continue to struggle with learning transitive relations, a cornerstone for complex planning. To address this issue, we investigate the Multi-Token…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Qimin Zhong , Hao Liao , Siwei Wang , Mingyang Zhou , Xiaoqun Wu , Rui Mao , Wei Chen

Large language models (LLMs) are pretrained by minimizing the cross-entropy loss for next-token prediction. In this paper, we study whether this optimization strategy can induce geometric structure in the learned model weights and context…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-14 Zhehang Du , Hangfeng He , Weijie Su

Standard training metrics like loss fail to explain the emergence of complex capabilities in large language models. We take a spectral approach to investigate the geometry of learned representations across pretraining and post-training,…

Large language models (LLMs) contain substantial factual knowledge which is commonly elicited by multiple-choice question-answering prompts. Internally, such models process the prompt through multiple transformer layers, building varying…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-31 Didier Chételat , Joseph Cotnareanu , Rylee Thompson , Yingxue Zhang , Mark Coates

We investigate the robustness of Large Language Models (LLMs) to structural interventions by deleting and swapping adjacent layers during inference. Surprisingly, models retain 72-95% of their original top-1 prediction accuracy without any…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Vedang Lad , Jin Hwa Lee , Wes Gurnee , Max Tegmark

Decades of cognitive science establish that humans navigate environments by forming cognitive maps, defined as allocentric and topology-preserving representations of 3D space. While modern Vision-Language Models (VLMs) demonstrate emergent…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Haoming Wang , Wei Gao

Modern large language models (LLMs) excel at tasks that require storing and retrieving knowledge, such as factual recall and question answering. Transformers are central to this capability because they can encode information during training…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-18 Nuri Mert Vural , Alberto Bietti , Mahdi Soltanolkotabi , Denny Wu

We investigate the relationship between the geometry of token embeddings and their role in the next token prediction within transformer models. An important aspect of this connection uses the notion of empirical measure, which encodes the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-22 Karthik Viswanathan , Yuri Gardinazzi , Giada Panerai , Alberto Cazzaniga , Matteo Biagetti

This paper demonstrates that progressive localization, the gradual increase of attention locality from early distributed layers to late localized layers, represents the optimal architecture for creating interpretable large language models…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-16 Joachim Diederich

Modern language models scale depth by stacking layers, each holding its own state - a per-layer KV cache in transformers, a per-layer matrix in Mamba, Gated DeltaNet (GDN), RWKV, and xLSTM. Biological systems lean heavily on recurrence…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Zanmin Wang

Large language models (LLMs) achieve state-of-the-art results across many natural language tasks, but their internal mechanisms remain difficult to interpret. In this work, we extract, process, and visualize latent state geometries in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-06 Alex Ning , Vainateya Rangaraju , Yen-Ling Kuo

Large language models often reason beyond surface tokens, but the internal stage at which token-level information becomes abstract relational structure remains unclear. We investigate this question by analyzing how attention heads and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Junjie Zhang , Zhen Shen , Xisong Dong , Gang Xiong

Although it is known that transformer language models (LMs) pass features from early layers to later layers, it is not well understood how this information is represented and routed by the model. We analyze a mechanism used in two LMs to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-12 Jack Merullo , Carsten Eickhoff , Ellie Pavlick

Transformer-based language models (LMs) are at the core of modern NLP, but their internal prediction construction process is opaque and largely not understood. In this work, we make a substantial step towards unveiling this underlying…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-14 Mor Geva , Avi Caciularu , Kevin Ro Wang , Yoav Goldberg

Large language models have achieved remarkable success in general language understanding tasks. However, as a family of generative methods with the objective of next token prediction, the semantic evolution with the depth of these models…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-11 Zhu Liu , Cunliang Kong , Ying Liu , Maosong Sun

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated inherent calibration capabilities, where predicted probabilities align well with correctness, despite prior findings that deep neural networks are often overconfident. Recent studies have…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Abhinav Joshi , Areeb Ahmad , Ashutosh Modi

Despite the success of Large Language Models (LLMs) in table understanding, their internal mechanisms remain unclear. In this paper, we conduct an empirical study on 16 LLMs, covering general LLMs, specialist tabular LLMs, and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Jia Wang , Chuanyu Qin , Mingyu Zheng , Qingyi Si , Peize Li , Zheng Lin